Vitae philosophorum

The veins, arteries, and sinews are the bonds of the soul. But when it is strong and settled down into itself, reasonings and deeds become its bonds. When cast out upon the earth, it wanders in the air like the body. Hermes is the steward of souls, and for that reason is called Hermes the Escorter, Hermes the Keeper of the Gate, and Hermes of the Underworld, since it is he who brings in the souls from their bodies both by land and sea; and the pure are taken into the uppermost region, but the impure are not permitted to approach the pure or each other, but are bound by the Furies in bonds unbreakable.

The whole air is full of souls which are called genii[*](The Greek daemons (δαίμονες) are, according to Hesiod, W. and D. 121-126, superhuman beings, guardians and benefactors of mankind, watching over the earth whereon once they lived.) or heroes; these are they who send men dreams and signs of future disease and health, and not to men alone, but to

Right has the force of an oath, and that is why Zeus is called the God of Oaths. Virtue is harmony, and so are health and all good and God himself; this is why they say that all things are constructed according to the laws of harmony. The love of friends is just concord and equality. We should not pay equal worship to gods and heroes, but to the gods always, with reverent silence, in white robes, and after purification, to the heroes only from midday onwards. Purification is by cleansing, baptism and lustration, and by keeping clean from all deaths and births and all pollution, and abstaining from meat and flesh of animals that have died, mullets, gurnards, eggs and egg-sprung animals, beans, and the other abstinences prescribed by those who perform mystic rites in the temples.

According to Aristotle in his work On the Pythagoreans, Pythagoras counselled abstinence from beans either because they are like the genitals, or because they are like the gates of Hades . . . as being alone unjointed, or because they are injurious, or because they are like the form of the universe, or because they belong to oligarchy, since they are used in election by lot. He bade his disciples not to pick up fallen crumbs, either in order to accustom them not to eat immoderately, or because connected with a person’s death; nay, even, according to Aristophanes,

Nor taste ye of what falls beneath the board !

Another of his precepts was not to eat white cocks, as being sacred to the Month and wearing suppliant garb—now supplication ranked with things good— sacred to the Month because they announce the time of day; and again white represents the nature of the good, black the nature of evil. Not to touch such fish as were sacred; for it is not right that gods and men should be allotted the same things, any more than free men and slaves. Not to break bread; for once friends used to meet over one loaf,

as the barbarians do even to this day; and you should not divide bread which brings them together; some give as the explanation of this that it has reference to the judgement of the dead in Hades, others that bread makes cowards in war, others again that it is from it that the whole world begins.[*](This may have some hidden sense: but it is tempting to adopt τόπου for τούτου with the Borbonicus.)

He held that the most beautiful figure is the sphere among solids, and the circle among plane figures. Old age may be compared to everything that is decreasing, while youth is one with increase. Health means retention of the form, disease its destruction. Of salt he said it should be brought to table to remind us of what is right; for salt preserves whatever it finds, and it arises from the purest sources, sun and sea.

This is what Alexander says that he found in the Pythagorean memoirs.[*](Alexander is cited above (§ 24). εὑρηκέναι comes in both sections. This means that, in the Lives of Pythagoras which D. L. consulted, the extract from Alexander has displaced a passage which came from a spurious Aristotelian treatise Περὶ Πυθαγορείων.) What follows is Aristotle’s.

But Pythagoras’s great dignity not even Timon

Pythagoras, inclined to witching works and ways,
1. Man-snarer, fond of noble periphrase.

Xenophanes[*](Fr. 7 D.) confirms the statement about his having been different people at different times in the elegiacs beginning:

Now other thoughts, another path, I show.

They say that, passing a belaboured whelp,
1. He, full of pity, spake these words of dole:
2. Stay, smite not ! ’Tis a friend, a human soul;
3. I knew him straight whenas I heard him yelp !

Thus Xenophanes. But Cratinus also lampooned him both in the Pythagorizing Woman and also in The Tarentines, where we read[*](Cratin. minor, Meineke, C.G.F. iii. 376.):

1. They are wont,
2. If haply they a foreigner do find,
3. To hold a cross-examination
4. Of doctrines’ worth, to trouble and confound him
5. With terms, equations, and antitheses
6. Brain-bung’d with magnitudes and periphrases.

To Loxias we sacrifice: Pythagoras his rite,
1. Of nothing that is animate we ever take a bite.

And Aristophon in the Pythagorist[*](Meineke, C.G.F. iii. 362.):

A. He told how he travelled in Hades and looked on the dwellers below,
1. How each of them lives, but how different by far from the lives of the dead
2. Were the lives of the Pythagoreans, for these alone, so he said,
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3. Were suffered to dine with King Pluto, which was for their piety’s sake.
4. B. What an ill-tempered god for whom such swine, such creatures good company make;

1. Their food is just greens, and to wet it pure water is all that they drink;
2. And the want of a bath, and the vermin, and their old threadbare coats so do stink
3. That none of the rest will come near them.

Pythagoras met his death in this wise.[*](In the account which follows two passages should be distinguished: (1) συνεδρεύοντος συνέβη, and (2) οὔτω δὲ καὶ(§ 40) ἀσιτήσαντα. A similar combination of Neanthes and Dicaearchus is found in Porphyry, Vit. Pyth 55 sqq., Neanthes apparently insisting on the absence, and Dicaearchus on the presence, of the master at the time when the brotherhood were attacked and scattered. Iamblichus, Vit. Pyth. 251 sq., cites Nicomachus, whose version agrees with that of Neanthes.) As he sat one day among his acquaintances at the house of Milo, it chanced that the house was set ablaze out of jealousy by one of the people who were not accounted worthy of admittance to his presence, though some say it was the work of the inhabitants of Croton anxious to safeguard themselves against the setting-up of a tyranny. Pythagoras was caught as he tried to escape; he got as far as a certain field of beans, where he stopped, saying he would be captured rather than cross it, and be killed rather than prate about his doctrines; and so his pursuers cut his throat.[*](This passage, partly in direct (γενόμενος, ἔστη, εἰπών) and partly in reported speech (καταληφθῆναι. ἀποσφαγῆναι), receives some light from the story of Myllias and his wife Timycha as given by Iamblichus, Vit. Pyth. 189-194, on the authority of Hippobotus and Neanthes (cf. also Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. § 61, where the story of Damon and Phintias is said to have been transferred by Hippobotus and Neanthes to the same trusty pair, Myllias and Timycha). The story in Iamblichus represents a band of Pythagoreans pursued by a tyrant’s myrmidons and caught in a plain where beans were growing, all of them preferring to die where they stood rather than trample on the beans; but this story might be located anywhere. It has nothing inherently to do with the end of Pythagoras. What remains, τὸν δὲ Π. καταληφθῆναι διεξιόντα, may be compared with Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. § 57, where we are told that the disciples made a bridge of their own bodies over the fire and thus the master escaped from the burning house but, in despair at the extinction of his school, chose a voluntary dealth. The words οὕτω δέ which follow come in awkwardly, as they are separated from the sentence about the fire.) So also were murdered

Dicaearchus, however, says that Pythagoras died a fugitive in the temple of the Muses at Metapontum after forty days’ starvation. Heraclides, in his Epitome of the Lives of Satyrus, says that, after burying Pherecydes at Delos, he returned to Italy and, when he found Cylon of Croton giving a luxurious banquet to all and sundry, retired to Metapontum to end his days there by starvation, having no wish to live longer. On the other hand, Hermippus relates that, when the men of Agrigentum and Syracuse were at war, Pythagoras and his disciples went out and fought in the van of the army of the Agrigentines, and, their line being turned, he was killed by the Syracusans as he was trying to avoid the beanfield; the rest, about thirty-five in number, were burned at the stake in Tarentum for trying to set up a government in opposition to those in power.

Hermippus gives another anecdote. Pythagoras, on coming to Italy, made a subterranean dwelling and enjoined on his mother to mark and record all that passed, and at what hour, and to send her notes down to him until he should ascend. She did so. Pythagoras some time afterwards came up withered and looking like a skeleton, then went into the assembly and declared he had been down to Hades, and even read out his experiences to them. They were so affected that they wept and wailed and looked upon him as divine, going so far as to send

Pythagoras had a wife, Theano by name, daughter of Brontinus of Croton, though some call her Brontinus’s wife and Pythagoras’s pupil. He had a daughter Damo, according to the letter of Lysis to Hippasus, which says of him, I am told by many that you discourse publicly, a thing which Pythagoras deemed unworthy, for certain it is that, when he entrusted his daughter Damo with the custody of his memoirs, he solemnly charged her never to give them to anyone outside his house. And, although she could have sold the writings for a large sum of money, she would not, but reckoned poverty and her father’s solemn injunctions more precious than gold, for all that she was a woman.

They also had a son Telauges, who succeeded his father and, according to some, was Empedocles’ instructor. At all events Hippobotus makes Empedocles say[*](Fr. 155 D.):

1. Telauges, famed
2. Son of Theano and Pythagoras.

To return to Pythagoras. According to Heraclides, the son of Serapion, he was eighty years old when he died, and this agrees with his own description of the life of man, though most authorities say he was ninety. And there are jesting lines of my own upon him as follows[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 121.):

Not thou alone from all things animate
1. Didst keep, Pythagoras. All food is dead
2. When boil’d and bak’d and salt-besprinkle-èd;
3. For then it surely is inanimate.

So wise was wise Pythagoras that he
1. Would touch no meats, but called it impious,
2. Bade others eat. Good wisdom: not for us
3. To do the wrong; let others impious be.

And again[*](Anth. Plan. v. 35.):

If thou wouldst know the mind of old Pythagoras,
1. Look on Euphorbus’ buckler and its boss.
2. He says I’ve lived before. If, when he says he was,
3. He was not, he was no-one when he was.

Woe! Woe! Whence, Pythagoras, this deep reverence for beans? Why did he fall in the midst of his disciples? A bean-field there was he durst not cross; sooner than trample on it, he endured to be slain at the cross-roads by the men of Acragas.

He flourished in the 60th Olympiad[*](540-536 b.c. Cf. Clem. Alex. Strom. i 65 in the 62nd Olympiad [532-528 b.c.], eight years later, and contemporary with Polycrates of Samos.) and his

For the last of the Pythagoreans, whom Aristoxenus in his time saw, were Xenophilus from the Thracian Chalcidice, Phanton of Phlius, and Echecrates, Diocles and Polymnastus, also of Phlius, who were pupils of Philolaus and Eurytus of Tarentum.

There were four men of the name of Pythagoras living about the same time and at no great distance from one another: (1) of Croton, a man with tyrannical leanings; (2) of Phlius, an athlete, some say a trainer; (3) of Zacynthus; (4) our subject, who discovered the secrets of philosophy [and taught them], and to whom was applied the phrase, The Master said (Ipse dixit), which passed into a proverb of ordinary life.

Some say there was also another Pythagoras, a sculptor of Rhegium, who is thought to have been the first to aim at rhythm and symmetry; another a sculptor of Samos; another a bad orator; another a doctor who wrote on hernia and also compiled some things about Homer; and yet another who, so we are told by Dionysius, wrote a history of the Dorian race. Eratosthenes says, according to what we learn from Favorinus in the eighth book of his Miscellaneous History, that the last-named was the first to box scientifically, in the 48th Olympiad,[*](588-584 b.c.) keeping his hair long and wearing a purple robe; and that when he was excluded with ridicule from the boys’ contest, he went at once to the men’s and won that;

this is declared by Theaetetus’s epigram[*](Anth. Plan. iii. 35.):

Know’st one Pythagoras, long-haired Pythagoras,
1. The far-fam’d boxer of the Samians?
2. I am Pythagoras; ask the Elians
3. What were my feats, thou’lt not believe the tale.

Favorinus says that our philosopher used definitions throughout the subject matter of mathematics; their use was extended by Socrates and his disciples, and afterwards by Aristotle and the Stoics.

Further, we are told that he was the first to call the heaven the universe and the earth spherical,[*](As Favorinus seems to have paid special attention to discoveries and the invention of names (cf. ii. 1, 20, viii. 12, 47, ix. 23, 34), it seems likely that he is our author’s authority here; so probably a different book of Favorinus is cited.) though Theophrastus says it was Parmenides, and Zeno that it was Hesiod.

It is said that Cylon was a rival of Pythagoras, as Antilochus[*](Apelt suggests Antiphon, comparing Xen. Mem. i. 6.) was of Socrates.

Pythagoras the athlete was also the subject of another epigram as follows[*](Anth. Plan. iii. 16.):

Gone to box with other lads
1. Is the lad Pythagoras,
2. Gone to the games Olympian
3. Crates’ son the Samian.

Pythagoras to Anaximenes.

Even you, O most excellent of men, were you no better born and famed than Pythagoras, would have risen and departed from Miletus. But now your ancestral glory has detained you as it had detained me were I Anaximenes’s peer. But if you, the best men, abandon your cities, then will their good order perish, and the peril from the Medes will increase.

For always to scan the heavens is not well, but more seemly is it to be provident for one’s

Having now finished our account of Pythagoras, we have next to speak of the noteworthy Pythagoreans; after them will come the philosophers whom some denominate sporadic [i.e. belonging to no particular school]; and then, in the next place, we will append the succession of all those worthy of notice as far as Epicurus, in the way that we promised. We have already treated of Theano and Telauges: so now we have first to speak of Empedocles, for some say he was a pupil of Pythagoras.