Pythagoras

⁶ Sosicrates, in his Successions, relates that Pythagoras was asked by Leon, the tyrant of the Phliasians, who he was.

He replied, “A philosopher.”

He used to compare life to a festival.

“And as some people came to a festival to contend for the prizes, and others for the purposes of traffic, and the best as spectators; so also in life, the men of slavish dispositions,” said he, “are born hunters after glory and covetousness, but philosophers are seekers after truth.”

Thus he spoke on this subject. But in the three treatises above mentioned, the following principles are laid down by Pythagoras generally.

He forbids men to pray for anything in particular for themselves, because they do not know what is good for them.

He calls drunkenness an expression identical with ruin, and[342] rejects all superfluity, saying, “That no one ought to exceed the proper quantity of meat and drink.” And on the subject of venereal pleasures, he speaks thus:

“One ought to sacrifice to Venus in the winter, not in the summer; and in autumn and spring in a lesser degree. But the practice is pernicious at every season, and is never good for the health.”

Once, when he was asked when a man might indulge in the pleasures of love, he replied, “Whenever you wish to be weaker than yourself.”

⁷ He divides the life of man thus. A boy for twenty years; a young man (νεάνισκος) for twenty years; a middle-aged man (νεανίας) for twenty years; an old man for twenty years.

These different ages correspond proportionably to the seasons: boyhood answers to spring; youth to summer; middle age to autumn; and old age to winter. And he uses νεάνισκος here as equivalent to μειράκιον, and νεανίας as equivalent to ἀνὴρ.

⁸ He was the first person, as Timæus says, who asserted that the property of friends is common, and that friendship is equality.

His disciples used to put all their possessions together into one store, and use them in common; and for five years they kept silence, doing nothing but listen to discourses, and never once seeing Pythagoras, until they were approved; after that time they were admitted into his house, and allowed to see him.

They also abstained from the use of cypress coffins, because the sceptre of Jupiter was made of that wood, as Hermippus tells us in the second book of his account of Pythagoras.

⁹ He had the most dignified appearance. His disciples believe that he was Apollo who had come from the Hyperboreans.

Once, he was stripped naked. He was seen to have a golden thigh.

There were many people who affirmed, that when he was crossing the river Nessus it addressed him by his name.

¹⁰ Timæus, in book 10 of his Histories, tells us, that Pythagoras used to say that women who were married to men had the names of the Gods, being successively called virgins, then nymphs, and subsequently mothers.

¹¹ Pythagoras carried geometry to perfection, after Mœris had first found out the principles of the[343] elements of that science, as Aristiclides tells us in book 2 of his History of Alexander.

Pythagoras applied himself above all to arithmetic.

He also discovered the numerical relation of sounds on a single string: he also studied medicine.

Apollodorus, the logician, records of him, that he sacrificed a hecatomb, when he had discovered that the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the squares of the sides containing the right angle.

There is an epigram which is couched in the following terms:—

When the great Samian sage his noble problem found, A hundred oxen dyed with their life-blood the ground.

¹² He was the first man who trained athletes on meat.

Phavorinus says in book 3 of his Commentaries that Eurymenes was the first man to eat meat for athletics.

Before that time, men used to train themselves on dry figs, moist cheese, and wheaten bread.

But some authors state, that a trainer of the name of Pythagoras certainly did train his athletes on this system, but that it was not our philosopher; for that he even forbade men to kill animals at all, much less would have allowed his disciples to eat them, as having a right to live in common with mankind. And this was his pretext;

But in reality he prohibited the eating of animals, because he wished to train and accustom men to simplicity of life, so that all their food should be easily procurable, as it would be, if they ate only such things as required no fire to dress them, and if they drank plain water; for from this diet they would derive health of body and acuteness of intellect.

The only altar at which he worshipped was that of Apollo the Father, at Delos, which is at the back of the altar of Ceratinus, because wheat, and barley, and cheese-cakes are the only offerings laid upon it, being not dressed by fire; and no victim is ever slain there, as Aristotle tells us in his Constitution of the Delians.

They say, too, that he was the first person who asserted that the soul went a necessary circle being changed about and confined at different times in different bodies.

¹³ He was also the first person who introduced measures and weights among the Greeks; as Aristoxenus the musician informs us.

¹⁴ Parmenides, too, assures us, that he was the first person who asserted the identity of Hesperus and Lucifer.

¹⁵ He was so greatly admired, that they used to say that his friends looked on all his sayings as the oracles of God.

He himself says in his writings, that he had come among men after having spent 207 years in the shades below.

Therefore the Lucanians and the Peucetians, and the Messapians, and the Romans, flocked around him, coming with eagerness to hear his discourses.

But until the time of Philolaus there were no doctrines of Pythagoras ever divulged; and he was the first person who published the three celebrated books which Plato wrote to have purchased for him for a hundred minæ.

Nor were the number of his scholars who used to come to him by night fewer than six hundred. And if any of them had ever been permitted to see him, they wrote of it to their friends, as if they had gained some great advantage.

The people of Metapontum used to call his house the temple of Ceres; and the street leading to it they called the street of the Muses, as we are told by Phavorinus in his Universal History.

And the rest of the Pythagoreans used to say, according to the account given by Aristoxenus, in the tenth book of his Laws on Education, that his precepts ought not to be divulged to all the world.

Xenophilus, the Pythagorean, when he was asked what was the best way for a man to educate his son, said, “That he must first of all take care that he was born in a city which enjoyed good laws.”

Pythagoras, too, formed many excellent men in Italy, by[345] his precepts, and among them Zaleucus,[110] and Charondas,[111] the lawgivers.

¹⁶ For he was very eminent for his power of attracting friendships; and among other things, if ever he heard that any one had any community of symbols with him, he at once made him a companion and a friend.