Vitae philosophorum

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.