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PYTHAGORAS. Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 580 B.C.E.) was a Greek mathematician, philosopher, and mystic. He wrote nothing himself, so his ideas survive through the writings of others, including Aristotle. Many people are familiar with him as the mathematician who formulated the Pythagorean theorem in geometry that relates the lengths of the sides in a right triangle. Others know him as a mystic and the first person known to be motivated by moral and philosophical concerns to adopt a vegetarian diet.

The schools and societies Pythagoras founded in the southern Italian area of Magna Graecia flourished for a while, and they developed and spread many of his concepts, which were later adopted and expanded by others. These concepts include bodily humors (evident in modern descriptions of melancholic and phlegmatic personalities), a tripartite soul, reincarnation, and the numerical ratios that determine the concordant intervals of the musical scales. Permeating all of his thoughts was the idea that all things are numbers. Numbers (individuals, groups, and series) were imbued with mystical properties that were carefully guarded and only shared among initiates to the Pythagorean schools founded by him or his disciples.

Pythagoras and his followers practiced one of the first recorded diets known as vegetarianism. He advocated a diet devoid of the flesh of slaughtered animals partially because he felt food influenced the distribution of the bodily humors and thereby the health of the individual and partially because it would prevent the killing of a reincarnated individual and its transmigrated soul. Up until the late nineteenth century non–meat eaters were generally known as "Pythagoreans."

Pythagoras is also alleged to have admonished his disciples to abstain from eating beans. Ancient and medieval writers ingeniously ascribed this pronouncement to the belief that beans contained or transmitted souls. The Greek phrase supporting this gastronomic recommendation, however, could also be construed to imply that his followers should avoid politics. Black and white beans were used as counters in voting in Magna Graecia. The school Pythagoras founded there became actively involved in the populist political views that gained ascendancy in the town of Kroton, where he lived for many years. Later an opposing aristocratic party gained control of the city and banished him and his followers for their political views and activism. Pythagoras died in exile. His supposed warning to "abstain from beans" is therefore thought to have meant "avoid politics." Alternatively he may have realized that eating undercooked broad (fave) beans (Vica faba vulgaris), a common food of the Mediterranean region, produced a severe hemolytic anemia (favism) in some people. Interestingly the same mutant gene that makes people sensitive to favism also increases their resistance to the malarial parasite, possibly accounting for the widespread presence of the mutant gene in regions with endemic malaria.

See also Greece, Ancient; Vegetarianism.

Mikal E. Saltveit