Vitae philosophorum

Four men have borne the name of Archytas: (1) our subject; (2) a musician, of Mytilene; (3) the compiler of a work On Agriculture; (4) a writer of epigrams. Some speak of a fifth, an architect, to whom is attributed a book On Mechanism which begins like this: These things I learnt from Teucer of Carthage. A tale is told of the musician that, when it was cast in his teeth that he could not be heard, he replied, Well, my instrument shall speak for me and win the day.

Aristoxenus says that our Pythagorean was never defeated during his whole generalship, though he once resigned it owing to bad feeling against him, whereupon the army at once fell into the hands of the enemy.

He was the first to bring mechanics to a system by applying mathematical principles; he also first

Alcmaeon of Croton, another disciple of Pythagoras, wrote chiefly on medicine, but now and again he touches on natural philosophy, as when he says, Most human affairs go in pairs. He is thought to have been the first to compile a physical treatise, so we learn from Favorinus in his Miscellaneous History; and he said that the moon [and] generally [the heavenly bodies] are in their nature eternal.

He was the son of Pirithous, as he himself tells us at the beginning of his treatise[*](Fr. 1 Diels): These are the words of Alcmaeon of Croton, son of Pirithous, which he spake to Brotinus, Leon and Bathyllus: Of things invisible, as of mortal things, only the gods have certain knowledge; but to us, as men, only inference from evidence is possible, and so on. He held also that the soul is immortal and that it is continuously in motion like the sun.

Hippasus of Metapontum was another Pythagorean, who held that there is a definite time which the

According to Demetrius in his work on Men of the Same Name, he left nothing in writing. There were two men named Hippasus, one being our subject, and the other a man who wrote The Laconian Constitution in five books; and he himself was a Lacedaemonian.

Philolaus of Croton was a Pythagorean, and it was from him that Plato requests Dion to buy the Pythagorean treatises.[*](Cf. iii. 9.) He (Dion) was put to death because he was thought to be aiming at a tyranny.[*](The subject of ἐτελεύτα would naturally be Philolaus, and so D. L. understood it; but the original reference was clearly to Dion.) This is what we have written upon him[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 126.):

Fancies of all things are most flattering;
1. If you intend, but do not, you are lost.
2. So Croton taught Philolaus to his cost,
3. Who fancied he would like to be their king.[*](Or in prose: My chief advice to all men is: to lull suspicion to rest. For even if you don’t do something, and people fancy you do, it is ill for you. So Croton, his native land, once put Philolaus to death, fancying he wished to have a tyrant’s house.)

His doctrine is that all things are brought about by necessity and in harmonious inter-relation. He was the first to declare that the earth moves in a circle,[*](i.e. round the central fire. See T. L. Heath, Aristarchus. 187 sqq.) though some say that it was Hicetas of Syracuse.

He wrote one book, and it was this work which, according to Hermippus, some writer said that Plato the philosopher, when he went to Sicily to Dionysius’s court, bought from Philolaus’s relatives

According to Demetrius in his work on Men of the Same Name, Philolaus was the first to publish the Pythagorean treatises, to which he gave the title On Nature, beginning as follows: Nature in the ordered universe was composed of unlimited and limiting elements, and so was the whole universe and all that is therein.