SOURCE: W. K. C. Guthrie, "Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans," in A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. I, Cambridge at the University Press, 1962, pp. 146-340.

[In the following excerpt, Guthrie highlights evidence of Pythagoras's teachings and life in the works of his contemporaries and other important figures in the history of ancient Greece.]

The history of Pythagoreanism is perhaps the most controversial subject in all Greek philosophy, and much about it must remain obscure. For this there are several good reasons, which are themselves not without interest. The subject is not only obscure but highly complex, and its complexity demands above all a clear statement at the outset of what is to be attempted and the outline of a plan of campaign.

First, is it justifiable to put a general account of the Pythagoreans at this early point in the exposition? Pythagoras was a contemporary of Anaximenes, but his school existed, and its doctrines developed and diverged, for the next two hundred years. Little can be attributed with certainty to the founder himself, and much Pythagorean teaching is associated with the names of philosophers of the late fifth or early fourth century. There is, however, no doubt that Pythagoras inaugurated a new tradition in philosophy, sharply divided in purpose and doctrine, as in external organization, from anything that we have met hitherto, and that from his time onwards this new current is something to be reckoned with. The Italian outlook exists in contrast to the Ionian, and an individual philosopher is likely to be influenced by sympathy with, or reaction against, the one or the other. Pythagoras himself is mentioned by the contemporary writer Xenophanes and by Heraclitus not many years after his death, and for an understanding of the development of thought during the fifth century it is important to have some idea of the main features of Pythagorean teaching which were certainly known to the philosophers of the period.

The attempt might be made to treat at this point only the earliest phase of the school, leaving until their proper chronological place the developments and divergences that culminated in a Philolaus and an Archytas and the use which they made of the latest mathematical and astronomical discoveries. This, however, would immediately meet the difficulty that our sources are in many cases too vague to allow of certain decision concerning the chronological sequence of doctrines or their attribution to a particular thinker. Moreover although divergences occurred, and strongly individual philosophers arose within the school, it was characteristic of the Pythagoreans to combine progressive thought with an immense respect for tradition. All revered the founder and claimed to belong to his brotherhood, and underlying any diversity of doctrine was an abiding unity of outlook. For the historian of philosophy the important thing is to understand as far as possible the spirit and doctrinal basis of this outlook as it existed up to the time of Plato. Lack of this understanding is a severe handicap in the study of Plato himself, on whose thought Pythagoreanism was so obviously a major formative influence. This pre-Platonic Pythagoreanism can to a large extent be regarded as a unity. We shall note developments and differences as and when we can, but it would be unwise to hope that these, in the fragmentary state of our knowledge, are sufficiently distinguishable chronologically to allow the separate treatment of earlier and later phases. The best course will be that which Aristotle himself felt forced to adopt before the end of the fourth century B.C. On the whole he regards the ideas of all previous generations of Pythagoreans as sufficiently homogeneous to be spoken of together, but in his general treatment he sometimes refers to or criticizes a tenet which he confines to 'some' of the school or to a named individual within it. At this distance of time we can hardly hope to do more.

The obscurity which surrounds the Pythagoreans is not merely due to the external circumstance that, as with the Milesians, most of the early records have perished. It is intimately bound up with the nature of the school itself. It was of the essence of Pythagoreanism that it should cause these difficulties to later interpreters, as indeed to most interpreters outside its own fellowship, and a summary of the difficulties that face us will be in part a summary of certain characteristics of the brotherhood itself. In this way the problem of the nature of the evidence, always prominent at this early stage of Greek thought, takes on here an altogether new and enhanced importance.

It seems best therefore first to enumerate the chief difficulties which stand in the way of a historian of the school, secondly to indicate briefly the resources and methods at the disposal of scholars to overcome these difficulties, and only after that to attempt, thirdly, an outline of the most interesting and important tenets and characteristics of the school. If at this third stage it should prove impossible, without undue loss of clarity, to complicate the account by a constant citation of authorities for every statement made, the two foregoing sections will at least have indicated the kind of process by which the results have been attained, and hence the degree of credence which they are likely to merit.

A. Difficulties

With Pythagoras the motive for philosophy ceases to be primarily what it had been for the Ionians, namely curiosity or technical improvement, and becomes the search for a way of life whereby a right relationship might be established between the philosopher and the universe. Plato will serve as witness to this well-known fact. In the Republic, deploring the uselessness of poets, he criticizes Homer thus (600 B):

Do we hear that Homer himself in his lifetime became for certain people personally a guide to their education? Are there any who admired him as disciples a master, and handed down to later generations a Homeric way of life, like Pythagoras, who himself was especially admired on this account, and his followers down to this day are conspicuous among the rest of men for the Pythagorean manner of life as they call it?

Pythagoras was indeed as much a religious and political teacher as a philosopher, and founded an organized society of men pledged to uphold his teaching in practice. For the present we are only concerned to notice one or two inevitable consequences of this.

(1) In a society which is a religious sect rather than a philosophical school, the name of the founder is held in particular veneration. He tends to be, if not actually deified, at least heroized or canonized, and in consequence his memory gets surrounded by a haze of legend. This happened early to Pythagoras. Herodotus (IV, 95) tells how he was brought into relation with the Thracian figure of Zalmoxis by a story that Zalmoxis had been his slave and pupil. Herodotus himself is sceptical, and in fact Zalmoxis was undoubtedly a deity of Thrace. The legends were well launched by the time Aristotle wrote his treatise on the Pythagoreans. Quotations from this work speak of their 'highly secret' division of rational creatures into three classes: gods, men, and beings like Pythagoras. Aristotle told also the stories of how Pythagoras had appeared in two places at once, how when he was seen stripped it was observed that he had a golden thigh, how once when he crossed a river the voice of the river-god was heard saying 'Hail Pythagoras!', how he killed by his own bite a snake whose bite was fatal, and so forth. He was credited with prophecies, and the men of Croton identified him with the Hyperborean Apollo. For the events

of Pythagoras's life we have no earlier source than Aristotle, and it is obvious that the existence of these legends tends to cast doubt on other parts of the tradition which in themselves seem credible enough.

(2) In a religious school there is a particularly strong temptation, not only to venerate the founder, but to attribute all its doctrine to him personally. It is 'the word of the Master'. This is not simply due to a pious desire to honour his memory, but is bound up with the religious view of truth which the Pythagoreans shared with adherents of the mystery-religions. They were indeed philosophers, and made scientific discoveries; but these they regarded in much the same light as the revelations which were an essential part of initiation into the mysteries. Many of their most important discoveries were mathematical, and there was always in the Greek mind a close connexion between mathematical, astronomical and religious speculation. Anecdotes may not be true, but their existence is revealing. One about an early Pythagorean called Hippasus says that he was heavily punished either for revealing to the world a secret of geometry or alternatively for accepting the credit for its discovery instead of allowing it to Pythagoras. The secret is sometimes said to have been the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with its sides, but the traditions both of secrecy and of ipse dixit are much too strong for us to believe, as has been suggested in modern times, that this was only disapproved of because the discovery of irrationals was an embarrassing skeleton in the Pythagorean cupboard. The fate of Hippasus was either drowning at sea or expulsion and the raising of a tomb to him as if dead. Where scientific facts are regarded thus as parts of a secret lore, there is a natural tendency to suppose them all to have been implicit in the original revelation of the founder.

Another motive is perhaps more difficult for a modern mind to appreciate. In the ancient world it was considered that a doctrine gained greatly in authority if it could be claimed to be, not the latest word on its subject, but of a venerable antiquity. Although this applied especially to religious teaching, it was by no means confined to it, and indeed, as a study of the Pythagoreans makes clear, there was no sharp distinction between 'scientific' and 'religious' knowledge. An obvious parallel on the religious side is provided by the Orphic writers, and since the religion taught by Pythagoras had much in common with these, the parallel is apt. All Orphic writings were produced under the name of Orpheus, although their composition continued beyond the beginning of the Christian era. According to a tradition going back to the fifth century B.C. (Ion of Chios, DK, 36B2), Pythagoras himself was one of those who wrote under this name. A feature of the Orphic teaching was its seemingly conscious rivalry with Homer, to whose conception of the relations between god and man it stood in strong contradiction. But to withstand so great an authority its prophet must claim superiority both in age and inspiration. Orpheus was the son of a Muse, and as an Argonaut he belonged to the earlier, heroic age of which Homer told, not the later age of lesser men in which Homer himself had lived.

(3) Besides the miraculous stories of the founder and the promulgation of later doctrine in his name, an obvious difficulty for the historian is constituted by the secrecy already mentioned. Like the mystery-cults which it in some ways resembled, Pythagoreanism too had its secrets…. Aristotle speaks of them in the fragment (192) already quoted, and his pupil Aristoxenus, who was a friend of the Pythagoreans of his day, said in his work on rules of education that according to them 'not everything was to be divulged to all men'. Isocrates in a bantering vein (Busiris, 29) remarks that those who claim to be disciples of Pythagoras are more admired for their silence than are the most famous orators for their speech. We may also quote Porphyry here, for the Neoplatonic writers are usually so ready to believe anything that their rare expressions of doubt or scepticism are all the more striking. Iamblichus, who was Porphyry's pupil, cheerfully attributes any Pythagorean doctrine to Pythagoras himself, even when 'the Pythagoreans' was all that stood in his source. In his life of Pythagoras, however (ch. 19), Porphyry writes: 'What he said to his intimates, no man can say with certainty, for they maintained a remarkable silence.' This is sufficiently impressive even if the words are not, like the preceding sentences, excerpted from Dicaearchus, which would take us back again from Neoplatonism to the fourth century B.C.

Iamblichus tells us (V.P. 72, 94) that applicants for membership of the brotherhood were made by Pythagoras to keep a five-year silence as part of their novitiate. If this is true, the famous Pythagorean silence was of two kinds, for we cannot suppose that the passages just quoted refer to this rule of training and no more. In reply to the argument that these authorities must be wrong, because in fact a great deal of Pythagorean teaching did become widely known, there is not much that needs to be said. It is perfectly possible for certain doctrines to be held in awe, coupled with a feeling that they should not be spoken of, long after the religious rule of silence imposed by the founders of a sect or cult has been broken and is known to have been broken. Some will be stricter than others, and more deeply shocked to hear the arcana openly avowed, but the feeling of religio still clings. It was well described by Lobeck in Aglaophamus (65-7), where he says, with particular reference to the Pythagoreans: 'De iis rebus quae iam notiores neque apud omnes sanctae essent, adeo religiose locuti sunt veteres nihilque in quo vel umbra quaedam arcani resideret, in publico iactarunt.' He has just quoted the story from Plutarch of how, when the guests at a symposium were discussing the reasons for Pythagorean prohibitions, one of them, mindful of the presence among them of the Pythagorean Lucius who had been sitting silent for some time, said politely: 'If this conversation is offensive to Lucius, it is time we stopped it.' The other prohibitions enjoined by Pythagoras, such as abstention from certain kinds of food, were undoubtedly only observed by some Pythagoreans and not by others, and doubtless the same was true of the injunction to secrecy. It is of course more logical to observe a meatless diet, even though other members of your sect are less strict, than it is to keep silent on matters which others have divulged; but, as Lobeck has well brought out, this is not a matter of logic but of religio.

The existence of this feeling against open discussion of Pythagorean doctrine, even if the secrets were not inviolably kept, must inevitably have led to omissions and distortions in ancient writings on the subject; for where the truth is not freely communicated, its place is naturally filled by baseless rumour. Its seriousness as an impediment to the historian has been variously estimated, and of course we have not the evidence for an exact appraisal of the extent either of the official prohibition or of its observance. Some have thought that the rule of secrecy only applied to ritual actions, the 'things done' … as they were called in the mysteries. As a rough generalization, this seems to have been true of the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries, and if it were so, the loss might be strictly limited. But for one thing it may be difficult to understand a belief fully without knowledge of the act, if there was one, which embodied and illustrated it. Belief and ritual action, where they coexist, are not unconnected. For another, the evidence of stories like that of Hippasus tells against this view.

It has also been suggested that although doubtless certain dogmas were included among the arcana, these will only have been matters of religious faith: there can have been no secrecy about their purely philosophical investigations. The objection to this is similar: there is no ground for separating the religious from the philosophical or scientific side in a system like the Pythagorean. In contrast to the Milesian tradition, it undertook philosophical researches with the conscious purpose of making them serve as a basis for religion. Mathematics was a religious occupation and the decad a holy symbol. If anything, there is more evidence for the jealous guarding of mathematical secrets than for that of any teaching about the gods or the soul. It is certainly difficult to believe that the doctrine of transmigration was ever treated as secret. But the truth is that the two sides are inextricably interwoven. We shall never know just how serious a bar to knowledge was the imperfectly kept rule of secrecy; but of its existence the evidence allows no doubt.

(4) These are three results of the particular character of Pythagoreanism which inevitably make difficulties for the historian: the legends which gathered round the figure of its founder, the tendency—from a variety of motives—to trace back to him all their doctrines and discoveries, and the secrecy with which some at least of their teaching was surrounded. There are other difficulties not arising solely from this cause, chief among them being the scantiness of contemporary sources of information. The word 'contemporary' is used here with the same thought in mind that it is the Pythagoreanism of the period from the lifetime of Pythagoras to the early fourth century which it would be especially de sirable to understand, since that is the Pythagoreanism which Plato knew, and to be able to assess its meaning for him would perhaps be a greater gain to the history of philosophy than any assessment of the Pythagoreans for their own sake. Yet Plato only mentions Pythagoras once … and the Pythagoreans once, in another passage in the Republic (530 D) where Socrates says that they regard music and astronomy as sister sciences. Aristotle, if the reference to Pythagoras in Metaph. A, 986a 30, is genuine, mentions him only twice in his extant works; but the authenticity of the passage is doubtful. The other reference is Rhet. B, 1398b 14. Neither is very informative, since the first only says that Alcmaeon lived in the old age of Pythagoras, and in the second Aristotle is quoting from Alcidamas, the pupil of Gorgias, an example of an inductive argument in which the sentence 'the Italians honoured Pythagoras' occurs. When we come to the 'fragments' of Aristotle, it is advisable to be cautious, since most of them are not represented as his actual words, and some in late compilers are doubtless at second or third hand. Moreover we have direct evidence that writers of Neopythagorean or Neoplatonic persuasion felt little compunction in substituting the name of Pythagoras himself for that of the Pythagoreans in citing their authorities. If we can trust our sources, we have half a dozen mentions of Pythagoras quoted from Aristotle, which will be used and criticized later as necessary. Their limitations may here be briefly indicated. They tell us that he believed in Pythagoras's Tyrrhenian descent, made passing mention of Cylon's opposition to him, told of his miracles and the Pythagorean division of rational creatures into gods, men and such as Pythagoras, and spoke of his prohibitions, including that of the eating of beans. Damascius credits him with the attribution to Pythagoras of a philosophical doctrine stated unmistakably in his own and Plato's terminology, which may yet be a genuine Aristotelian restatement of early Pythagorean teaching, and in the Protrepticus of Iamblichus we have what is probably an authentic extract from the Protrepticus of Aristotle in which he quotes Pythagoras as having said that the chief end of man is the observation of the heavens and of nature.

Of Pythagorean philosophy Aristotle in his surviving works gives plenty of explanation and criticism, though it is not always easy to understand. He likes to refer to the school as 'those who are called Pythagoreans', no doubt implying that it would be uncritical to assume that all their doctrines go back to Pythagoras himself, but also calls them 'the Italians' and their philosophy 'the Italian'. In De Caelo (293a20) he gives them the full title: 'The philosophers of Italy who are called Pythagoreans'. He also speaks of'some Pythagoreans' as maintaining a certain view, which suggests divisions within the school (such as are spoken of in later tradition) and perhaps a feeling of vagueness and uncertainty already existing in his own mind.

Aristotle is the earliest author to give any detailed information about the Pythagoreans, and in trying to recover their views up to the time of Plato it will be necessary to pay the closest attention to what he says. Of Pythagoras himself as a writer we have only the contradictory statements of much later men, some of whom say that he wrote nothing while others claim to give the names of some of his books. Knowing the tendency of the school to attribute all its works to the founder, we shall treat these claims with well-merited suspicion. We have no fragments of Pythagorean writings before the time of Philolaus, the leader of the school at Thebes at the end of the fifth century who is mentioned in Plato's Phaedo. Indeed Diogenes Laertius states (VIII, 15) that up to the time of Philolaus knowledge of Pythagorean beliefs was impossible. There exist a number of fragments attributed to him, but unfortunately their genuineness is much disputed. Not only have we no Pythagorean writings before this time, but surviving Greek literature from Pythagoras's lifetime to the end of the fifth century provides only some halfdozen mentions of himself or his school. This is the more unfortunate in that their doctrines were certainly influential from the beginning. Democritus is said (D.L. IX, 38) to have written a book on Pythagoras, yet his extant fragments contain no explicit reference to Pythagorean doctrine.

The most abundant, and on the face of it precise, part of our information originates with the revival of Pythagoreanism which began about the time of Cicero and continued until the rise of the Neoplatonic school in the third century A.D. Indeed the Neoplatonists, who are the direct source of much of this information, absorbed many of its beliefs, as it in its turn had absorbed those of the Academy. From the Neoplatonists we have books on the life of Pythagoras and on the Pythagorean life by Porphyry the pupil of Plotinus and Iamblichus the pupil of Porphyry. Both are compilations—that of Iamblichus a particularly careless one—and their immediate sources are Neopythagorean. From the point of view of one who is anxious to extract from it genuine early Pythagorean doctrine and history, this Neopythagorean material suffered from two related faults:

(i) A love of the marvellous. It arose in an age very different from that of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., an age when men felt themselves adrift in a world so large that they had lost their bearings and looked to philosophy for an anchor on which they could outride the storm. Philosophy tended to become wholly religious in character, and religion was all too often degenerating into superstition. There was a remarkable recrudescence of primitive religious phenomena. A magical formula, for instance, which at first sight gives the impression of being genuinely primitive, is equally likely to be a product of the declining intellectual standards of this age of credulity, which are amply vouched for by the magical papyri of Alexandrian and Roman times. The religious and magical element, though undoubtedly present in Pythagoreanism from the beginning, was thus easily exaggerated.

(ii) As a natural corollary to their religious and superstitious character, these later writers exhibit a singular lack of any critical faculty in compiling their accounts. Their interest in Pythagoras was after all very different from ours, namely to use him as an inspiration for their own age, not to achieve a strictly historical account of him and his school; and when one considers the number of philosophical schools that by this time existed for them to play with, it is not surprising that earlier and later, Pythagorean and non-Pythagorean material are thoroughly mingled in the 'Pythagoreanism' which they present. Plato and Aristotle, Stoic and Epicurean all play their part, and sometimes a doctrine attributed to an early Pythagorean can be easily recognized as an innovation of Aristotle or the Stoics. Whole books are extant, like the treatise on the World-Soul attributed to Timaeus of Locri, which are associated with the names of individual early members of the school but can be recognized from their content as pious forgeries from the time of its revival.

B. Methods of Approach

What then are the resources at our disposal, and what methods can we employ, to overcome these difficulties and arrive at a modicum of fact concerning the history and nature of Pythagoreanism in the period from Pythagoras to Plato?

(1) Sources of the sixth and fifth centuries

The first thing to do is to note every scrap of early evidence. Though lamentably scanty, it is of value both for itself and as a touchstone to apply in a critical investigation of later information. The few testimonies of the sixth and fifth centuries may be dealt with here.

(a) Xenophanes of Colophon must have been born within a few years of Pythagoras, though he probably outlived him for a good many. He left his native Ionia as a young man, and spent the rest of his life as an exile, largely in Sicily and Italy. The tone of his poems is highly satirical in their treatment of others, and Diogenes Laertius (VIII, 36, Xenoph. fr. 7 DK) quotes four of his elegiac lines as having been written about Pythagoras. They ridicule his doctrine of the transmigration of souls by telling the story of how he saw a man beating a dog, and exclaimed: 'Stop, do not beat him: it is the soul of a friend, I recognize his voice.'

(b) The life of Heraclitus also in all likelihood overlapped that of Pythagoras. In a passage designed to illustrate his proud and contemptuous nature, Diogenes gives the following as a quotation from his book (D.L. IX, 1, Heracl. fr. 40 DK): 'Much learning does not teach insight … ; otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus.' There is also fr. 129, which runs, literally translated: 'Pythagoras son of Mnesarchus practised inquiry most of all men, and having made a selection of these writings contrived a wisdom (… perhaps better "learning" or "cleverness") of his own, a polymathy, a worthless artifice.' The rather obscure words 'having made a selection of these writings', if they are a genuine part of the fragment and correctly transmitted, cannot refer to writings of Pythagoras himself as Diogenes supposes (VIII, 6: he is disputing the view that Pythagoras wrote nothing), but seem to constitute a charge of plagiarism.

(c) The many-sided writer Ion of Chios was born about 490, perhaps little later than the death of Pythagoras, and from a line in the Peace of Aristophanes (see 832 ff.) it appears that he was dead by 421 when that play was produced. According to Diogenes, he said in his philosophical work Triagmoi (in which after the Pythagorean fashion he exalted the cosmic importance of the triad) that Pythagoras had produced some writings under the name of Orpheus (D.L. VIII, 8, Ion, fr. 2 DK). Diogenes also quotes elegiac lines of his on Pherecydes in which he alludes to the teaching of Pythagoras on the soul (I, 120, Ion, fr. 4): 'So he, endowed with manliness and modesty, has for his soul a joyful life even in death, if indeed Pythagoras, wise in all things, truly knew and understood the minds of men.' There is some doubt about the exact translation of the last two lines, but they certainly appeal to Pythagoras for the doctrine that a good man will be rewarded after death.

The opening of Ion's Triagmoi (fr. 1) shows that he admired and adopted Pythagorean ideas, and fr. 2 strongly suggests that he made use of Orphic poems which, rightly or wrongly, were in his time ascribed to Pythagoras. No doubt it was in these that he found the doctrine of rewards (and presumably punishments) after death for which in his elegiacs he claims Pythagoras as the authority.

(d) Herodotus was an almost exact contemporary of Ion, for it is fairly certain that he was born in 485/4. In book IV, ch. 93-4, he describes the religion of the Thracian Getae, who are remarkable for their belief in immortality. They think, he says, that they do not really die, but at death are transported to their god Zalmoxis (who is also mentioned as a Thracian god by Plato, Charmides, 156D). The Greeks, however, who live in the Black Sea region have a different story about this Zalmoxis. They say that he was a human being, who had been Pythagoras's slave in Samos. Having gained his freedom and made a fortune he returned to his native people, and, finding them primitive and stupid, determined to improve them. 'Since, then,' Herodotus continues, 'he was acquainted with the Ionian standard of life and with habits more civilized than those of the Thracians, having lived among Greeks and indeed with one of the most powerful of Greek teachers, Pythagoras, he constructed a hall in which he received the leading citizens, and in the course of a banquet instructed them that neither he nor his guests nor their descendants would die, but they would go to a place where they would live for ever and enjoy all good things.' This Greek story went on to tell of a trick which Zalmoxis played to gain credit for his new teaching. He retired into a secret underground chamber for three years, during which time the Thracians believed him dead. In the fourth year he reappeared, thus seeming to demonstrate his immortality. Herodotus himself is sceptical about the story, maintaining that if Zalmoxis were indeed a man and not a god, then he must have lived a long time before Pythagoras.

Of course the Thracian belief in immortality, which Herodotus represents as having been accompanied by human sacrifice, owed nothing to Greek influence. The interesting thing is that the Greeks noted the resemblance between it and the teaching of Pythagoras, and used it as evidence that in this, as in so much else, they had been the teachers of the barbarians. The instruction in immortality is represented as the direct consequence of association with the great Greek teacher. Probably the resemblance extended to a common belief in transmigration, which we already know to have been taught by Pythagoras, since the reappearance of Zalmoxis in a body more than three years after his death seems to demand something of the sort. Similar beliefs were in any case common among these northern peoples, and entered from them into Greek mythology. Thus Aristeas of Proconnesus (another figure familiar to 'the Greeks who live by the Hellespont and Pontus') reappeared seven years after he was thought to have died, and again 240 years after that, and also took the body of a raven (Hdt. IV, 14). If there was borrowing here, it is far more likely to have been the other way round.

Herodotus, besides what he says about Pythagoras, provides the first extant mention of a Pythagorean sect. Opinions differ on whether he is speaking of Pythagoreans or Pythagorean rites, since the adjective as he uses it might be masculine or neuter, but this at present is unimportant. The passage (II, 81) has been in its detailed interpretation the subject of prolonged controversy, into which our present purpose does not compel us to enter. Herodotus has been saying that though the Egyptians (who are the subject of this whole second book) wear wool in ordinary life, they do not wear it in temples nor are they buried in it, for this is against their religion. He continues: 'The Egyptians agree in this with the Orphics, as they are called, and with the Pythagoreans; for it is similarly against the rule for anyone who takes part in these rites to be buried in woollen garments. These customs are the subject of a sacred book.'

It was a favourite thesis of Herodotus, in which he certainly goes beyond both truth and probability, that the Greeks had borrowed their most notable religious ideas, and even their deities, from the Egyptians. It would be captious not to mention here the place in which he gives as Egyptian, 'but borrowed by the Greeks both earlier and later', a more detailed version of the doctrine of transmigration which there is good reason for thinking was shared by the Pythagoreans and the Orphics (II, 123). But since Herodotus does not here cite the Pythagoreans by name (only remarking, to the disgust of the modern historian, that he knows the names of the Greeks concerned but is keeping them to himself), this must find no emphasis in the present brief survey of early references. One may simply add that the doctrine was certainly a Greek one, since in fact Egyptian religion knew nothing of transmigration.

(e) I have left until the last, slightly out of chronological order, a writer a little older than Herodotus who was himself a notable religious philosopher and shared with the Pythagoreans an enthusiastic belief in transmigration: Empedocles. This is because, although there can be no reasonable doubt that the subject of his eulogy is Pythagoras, he leaves him unnamed, and it is in keeping with our present strict canon to mark the fact. Our source for the quotation, Porphyry in his life of Pythagoras, refers the lines to him, and this attribution goes back to the Sicilian historian Timaeus in the fourth century B.C.; but since Diogenes Laertius (VIII, 54) also says that some referred them (quite impossibly) to Parmenides, we must suppose that the praise was bestowed anonymously. They are as follows (fr. 129): 'There was among them a man of surpassing knowledge, who possessed vast wealth of understanding, capable of all kinds of cunning acts; for when he exerted himself with all his understanding, easily did he see every one of all the things that are, in ten and even twenty human lives.'

(2) Fourth-century sources excluding Aristotle and his pupils

The chronological divisions in this preliminary survey are inevitably arbitrary. Plato was born in 427 and when he spoke of the Pythagoreanism of the fifth century knew what he was talking about. Aristotle was Plato's close associate for twenty years. Nevertheless it is as well to regard Plato and his contemporaries as reflecting a period of their own, different in spirit and intellectual content from that of the early and mid fifth century and again from the new era of research into which philosophy enters with Aristotle and those trained in his school, and which gives to his evidence a distinctive stamp. Moreover his surviving treatises are in themselves so rich a source, comparatively speaking, that at this stage they can only be mentioned. Later they will be used.

(a) We have noted … that Plato only once mentions the Pythagoreans by name, but this single reference is of great importance. In the seventh book of the Republic, discussing the course of study which is to be laid down for the philosophical Guardians, Socrates comes to astronomy, and explains that it is not to be limited to a study of the stars and their visible motions. These must only be used as a means of reaching beyond them to the mathematical principles and laws of motion which they illustrate, but which, as visible and material objects, they cannot embody with perfect exactitude. The philosopher's aim must be to understand 'the true realities; that is, the movements and bodies in movement whose true relative speeds are to be found in terms of pure numbers and perfect figures, and which are perceptible to reason and thought but not visible to the eye'.

From astronomy Socrates then passes, by what he claims is a natural transition, to harmonics (530D): 'I think we may say that, just as our eyes are made for astronomy, so our ears are made for harmony …, and that the two are, as the Pythagoreans say, and as we should agree, sister sciences.' Because of the attention they have given to this study, Socrates continues, we must be prepared to learn from them. Nevertheless their work in this sphere shows a failure analogous to that of contemporary workers in astronomy, in that 'they look for numerical relationships in audible concords, and never get as far as formulating problems and asking which numerical relations are concordant and why'.

Although there is no other mention of the Pythagorean school as such, Plato has something to say about Philolaus, who stayed for a time in Thebes after the anti-Pythagorean revolution in Italy and was later believed to have been the first to put Pythagorean doctrine into writing. (I have omitted his fragments from the certain fifth-century evidence owing to the doubts that have been felt about their authenticity.) In the Phaedo, Simmias and Cebes are introduced into the conversation with Socrates as Thebans and pupils of Philolaus. When Socrates speaks of people who hold suicide to be unlawful, Cebes asks him to explain, and he expresses surprise that his friends, who have listened to Philolaus, have not heard all about matters of this sort from him. Cebes replies that he has indeed heard Philolaus and others express this view, but that they did not seem to make their reasons clear. Socrates then goes on to expound what he calls 'the account of it given in secret teachings', a phrase strongly reminiscent of the well-known reticence of the Pythagoreans. According to this account we are in this world as men held in custody, from which it is not right to try to free ourselves or run away, because our guardians are the gods, and human beings are their possessions. The explanation can hardly be separated from the injunction itself, and its religious message agrees with what we know of Philolaus from later sources, including an actual quotation attributed to him by Clement of Alexandria.

(b) Isocrates, the rival of Plato and his elder by a few years, repeats for his own not very philosophical purposes the legend that Pythagoras owed all his wisdom to Egypt. In his rhetorical exercise in praise of Busiris he repeats a number of Greek commonplaces about the Egyptians, including the belief in their religious genius and example.

'One who was not pressed for time', he continues (ch. 28), 'could tell many wonderful tales of their holiness, which I am not the only nor the first one to observe. Many have done so both of present and past generations, among them Pythagoras of Samos, who went to Egypt, and having become their pupil was the first to introduce philosophy in general to Greece, and showed a more conspicuous zeal than other men for sacrifices and temple rites; for he reckoned that even if this led to no reward from heaven, among men at least it would bring him the highest reputation. And so it turned out. His fame so surpassed that of others that while all the young men wanted to be his disciples, the older would rather see their sons enjoying his company than minding their own affairs. The truth of this cannot be doubted, for even at the present day those who claim to be his disciples win more admiration by being silent than do those most noted for the gift of speech.'

We detect here the ironical note which so often creeps into the ordinary Greek's remarks on Pythagoras and his school, broadening sometimes into a more or less tolerant contempt. They were a favourite butt for the writers of the Middle Comedy in the late fourth century, who ridicule chiefly their abstention from flesh and other ascetic (and unhygienic) practices. (DK, I, 478-80.)

(c) Heraclides of Pontus was a pupil of Plato, who joined the Academy at about the same time as Aristotle, and a notable philosopher and scientist in his own right. In his writings (of which only fragments remain) he dealt at some length with Pythagoras and his school, and there are signs that they exercised considerable influence on him. Although his works are lost, later writers provide several quotations on this subject. They are referred to here in the numbering of F. Wehrli's edition of the fragments of Heraclides.

Fr. 40. Porphyry (De Abst. I, 26) cites Heraclides among other authorities for the statement that the Pythagorean ban on flesh-eating is not absolute.

Fr. 41 (Lydus, De Mens. IV, 42, p. 99 Wünsch). Heraclides explains the Pythagorean ban on beans by the curious superstition that if a bean is laid in a new tomb and covered with dung for forty days, it takes on the appearance of a man.

Fr. 44 (Clem. Strom. II, 84 St.). Heraclides attributes to Pythagoras the statement that happiness consists in knowledge of the perfection of the numbers of the soul.

Fr. 89 (D.L. VIII, 4). Heraclides tells, ostensibly on the authority of Pythagoras himself, of his successive incarnations. He was once Aethalides, who, when his father Hermes offered him any gift except immortality, chose to retain both in life and in death the memory of what happened to him. (Cf. Apollonius Rhodius, I, 640ff.) Later he became the Homeric hero Euphorbus, wounded by Menelaus, who was wont to recount the wanderings of his soul in animals and plants as well as human bodies, and tell of the fate of souls in Hades. Next his soul entered Hermotimus, who authenticated the story of his previous life by identifying the rotting shield of Menelaus in the temple of Apollo at Branchidae. It then became a Delian fisherman named Pyrrhus, and finally Pythagoras, carrying with it still the memory of its previous phases of existence.

Fr. 88. Cicero in the Tusculans (V, 3, 8) tells from Heraclides the story of Pythagoras's conversation with Leon the ruler of Phlius. Leon, admiring the genius and eloquence of Pythagoras, questioned him about his art. He replied, however, that he was not a master of any art, but a philosopher. This word was strange to Leon, and, to explain to him what it meant, Pythagoras employed a simile which has become famous. Life, he said, is like the gathering at the Olympic festival, to which people flock from three motives: to compete for the glory of a crown, to buy and sell, or simply as spectators. So in life, to which we come ex alia vita et natura profecti, some enter the service of fame and others of money, but the best choice is that of those few who spend their time in the contemplation of nature, as lovers of wisdom, that is, philosophers.

The last quotation is a warning that if this section is to be confined to passages of undoubted independence as authorities for Pythagoreanism, then it is time to stop, for we have already entered the region of controversy. Heraclides wrote dialogues (see frr. 22ff), and no doubt the conversation between Pythagoras and Leon occurred in one of these compositions which, like those of his teacher Plato, would have a moral rather than a historical purpose and could contain elements of free invention. Moreover the distinction between the three types of life, and corresponding types of humanity, was a favourite theme of Plato's, expressed most concisely in Republic, IX, 581C; and it is probably the prevailing view today that in this story 'Heraclides is projecting Academic ideas on to Pythagoras'. A. Cameron, on the other hand, has ably defended the view that Heraclides is relying largely on fifth-century material. The value of learning was deeply rooted in Greek consciousness, as is amply illustrated in Herodotus, tragedy and elsewhere, and Pythagoras was early regarded as an outstanding exemplar of it (Heraclitus, Herodotus). Transmigration was a Pythagorean belief long before it was Platonic, and the notable thing about the presentation of Pythagoras's philosophic ideal in Heraclides is that it is firmly linked to that belief. In this it goes naturally with his other story of how the single soul which became Pythagoras amassed a store of remembered knowledge in its pilgrimage through several lives and the periods between them, which in its turn reminds us of the testimony of Empedocles, fr. 129, even more strongly than of Plato. Jaeger's dismissal of the words nos … in hanc vitam ex alia vita et natura profectos as 'nothing but Plato's well-known doctrine of the soul' is falsified by the words 'nothing but'. He continues (Aristotle, 432, n.l): 'We cannot infer from it that the doctrine of the three "lives" was Pythagorean, on the ground that the transmigration of souls was a demonstrably Pythagorean view'; but since the transmigration of souls was a demonstrably Pythagorean view, we cannot with any greater certainty infer that the doctrine of the three lives was not Pythagorean, and there are, as Cameron has shown, strong arguments to suggest that it was.

This does not of course amount to saying that the simile goes back to Pythagoras himself, but only that the Greek ideal of philosophia and theoria (for which we may compare Herodotus's attribution of these activities to Solon, I, 30) was at a fairly early date annexed by the Pythagoreans for their master, and linked with the doctrine of transmigration. At the same time, when one considers that both this doctrine and the outstand ing zeal for knowledge were known to be characteris tic of Pythagoras in his own lifetime (Xenophanes) and very soon after (Heraclitus), it would be rash to deny outright that the causal linkage was Pythagoras's own work.

From this survey of the explicit references to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans down to the time of Plato, it will be seen how much must have been lost and how difficult it is to form any comprehensive idea of their history and beliefs in this period from contemporary sources. Nevertheless it is something to know that, even if we were to take no account either of later evidence or of anything in earlier writers which is not attributed by name to the school but may with great probability be referred to it (and to employ neither of these resources would be unnecessarily defeatist), we could still assert the following:

1. Pythagoras himself taught the transmigration of souls (Xenophanes, leading credibility to Heraclides Ponticus), and posthumous rewards for the meritorious (Ion).

2. He was known to his near-contemporaries as a polymath, a man of prodigious learning and an insatiable thirst for inquiry [Heraclitus, Herodotus], and in his teaching the acquisition of knowledge was related to transmigration (Empedocles, and in all probability Heraclides).

3. By the fifth century the veneration of his followers had already exalted him to legendary status, regarding him as more than man and crediting him with miracles (Herodotus; and the tales repeated by Aristotle were naturally not his invention but traditional).

4. From at least the middle of the fifth century the Pythagoreans were known to practise certain superstitious taboos (on burial in wool, Herodotus; compare Heraclides on eating flesh and beans: here at any rate there is no contamination from Academic doctrine, and the prohibitions are of course much older).

5. Silence and secrecy were prominent features of their behaviour (Isocrates, …).

6. They formed a society of their own, practising what was to their contemporaries a distinctive and extraordinary way of life (Plato, Rep. 600B).

7. Philolaus, a leading fifth-century Pythagorean, preached the wickedness of suicide, basing it on a secret logos of which the purport was that men are not their own masters but belong to the gods (Plato, Phaedo).

8. As to the more scientific side of their teaching, we have learned from Plato that they were the acknowledged experts in astronomy, harmonics and the science of number. They regarded all these studies as closely allied, because in their view the key to the understanding both of the movements of the stars and of the notes in the musical scale lay in the establishment of a numerical relation. We may allow ourselves to note that the actual union of astronomy and harmonics in the remarkable theory of the 'harmony of the spheres', adopted by Plato, is described and attested as Pythagorean in the same century by Aristotle. This is the view that physical objects moving as rapidly as the heavenly bodies must necessarily produce a sound; that the intervals between the several planets and the sphere of the fixed stars correspond mathematically to the intervals between the notes of the octave, and that therefore the sound which they produce has a definite musical character.

The importance of even these scanty items of information becomes evident when we remember that for Plato the problem of the possibility of knowledge was central, and that he solved it by the supposition that since the world of experience is strictly unknowable, such awareness of truth as we acquire in this life must con sist in the recollection of what we discovered before birth: i.e. it depends on the doctrine of reincarnation. What may well cause surprise, even allowing for the fragmentary state of the evidence, is the narrowness of the field which our summary covers. Except for the very general remarks of Plato in a single passage, there is no mention of Pythagorean discoveries (let alone discoveries of Pythagoras himself) in mathematics or music. Of the famous doctrine that 'things are numbers' there is not a whisper before Aristotle. So much of what we usually think of as characteristic of Pythagoras and his school is missing in our evidence until the latter half of the fourth century. Rohde went so far as to say that Pythagoras himself was not a philosopher at all, but only a religious reformer. To him it seemed an important argument ex silentio that even Aristotle and his pupil Aristoxenus knew nothing of any physical or ethical doctrines of Pythagoras himself. The sole allusion in the period so far considered to his personal interest in mathematical explanation is Heraclides's attribution to him (in fr. 44) of the statement that happiness consists in knowledge of the perfection of the numbers of the soul, and since this does smack strongly of Academic doctrine it seemed more prudent to omit it from our summary. As for Aristotle, the only safe conclusion to draw from his silence is that he hesitated to write of Pythagoras at all, preferring to speak generally of Pythagoreans because Pythagoras had already become a legend and his critical mind could not feel satisfied that any specific doctrine was to be traced with certainty to the Master himself. Once we speak of the Pythagoreans, however, it might equally well be argued that by Aristotle's time at least they had become a purely scientific school, since it is only as such that they appear in his extant treatises. This argument has in fact been used, but is of little weight. The simple answer is that only their mathematics and philosophy were relevant to Aristotle's subject-matter in his extant treatises. The meagre fragments of his lost works are sufficient to show that he knew of another side to their teaching. As for the silence of our early sources on Pythagoras as a philosopher and mathematician, it is enough to say that all the later biographical writers show him as such, and they obviously preserve much early material. It would be absurd to suggest that the authors down to Plato's time constitute our only hope of learning anything about him. Nevertheless to begin in this way, so that statements of genuine antiquity are clearly marked off both from later testimonies and from our own inferences, is salutary and methodically sound.

(3) Post-Platonic sources

This general heading brings together sources of very disparate date and unequal value. But all alike can be sharply distinguished from earlier material in that they are to a far greater extent the inevitable subject of controversy and doubt. The reasons are briefly these.

Two pupils of Aristotle, Aristoxenus and Dicaearchus, wrote extensively about the Pythagoreans. Aristoxenus (who, as it is not irrelevant to note, was an expert on music) wrote whole books on Pythagoras and his acquaintances, on the Pythagorean life and other Pythagorean matters, and we are told that he personally knew those who were spoken of as the last generation of the Pythagoreans, that is the pupils of Philolaus and Eurytus including Echecrates. Dicaearchus was a scientific researcher of great learning and independence of mind. Here then are two further fourth-century sources of information who would seem to merit a high degree of trust. In the first place, however, their works have not come down to us, and what they said is known only through quotations in the Neoplatonic lives of Pythagoras by Porphyry and Iamblichus and similar compilations of the Christian era. Although these writers frequently cite their fourth-century predecessors by name, there is often dispute about the actual extent or the accuracy of their quotations, especially as these are not thought to have been made at first hand. Rohde, for instance, in his work on the sources of Iamblichus, concluded that he made direct use only of the works of Nicomachus of Gerasa and Apollonius of Tyana, the former a mathematician of about A.D. 100 whose work was imbued with Neopythagorean numbermysticism, the latter a Neopythagorean sage and wonder-worker of perhaps half a century earlier. Secondly, as we have already seen with Heraclides Ponticus, members of the schools of Plato and Aristotle are themselves already under suspicion of confusing Platonic doctrine with that of the Pythagoreans. In general the separation of early Pythagoreanism from the teaching of Plato is one of the historian's most difficult tasks, to which he can scarcely avoid bringing a subjective bias of his own. If later Pythagoreanism was coloured by Platonic influences, it is equally undeniable that Plato himself was deeply affected by earlier Pythagorean beliefs; but in deciding the extent to which each has influenced the other, most people have found it impossible to avoid being guided by the extent of their admiration for Plato and consequent unwillingness to minimize his originality.

Another source from the turn of the fourth and third centuries B.C. is the Sicilian historian Timaeus from Taormina. He had intimate knowledge of affairs in Magna Graecia, where the Pythagorean society had played an important political role, and seems to have been unbiased by any personal attachment to the school. In his case therefore the one serious disadvantage arises from our fragmentary and indirect knowledge of his writings.

Since, then, this later fourth-century literature is known through writers of the Graeco-Roman period, we have from now on to lean heavily on studies in source-criticism. The source-critic starts from passages which are expressly ascribed to an earlier writer, and, by comparison with these and passages of known origin elsewhere, endeavours to detect other derived material and assign it to its original authority. He may also extract a genuine vein of ancient matter from the ore in which it is imbedded by testing it against whatever is known as certain or probable Pythagorean history and doctrine from sources of the earliest (pre-Platonic) period. The atmosphere of post-Aristotelian philosophy—Stoic, neo-Academic or other—so permeates the literature of the Graeco-Roman period that a passage containing no trace of it may suddenly stand out. Its freshness and difference strike a reader and make him at least suspect that he is dealing with something earlier. The delicacy of this work, and the element of personal judgement inseparable from it, are mitigated by the habits and methods of writers like Iamblichus. These compilers often made no attempt to rewrite and weld their sources into a new and homogeneous whole, but simply copied out extracts side by side, even repeating conflicting accounts in different parts of their work. Thus in his Protrepticus, for example, Iamblichus inserts passages from the Phaedo, Gorgias and other dialogues of Plato practically verbatim without the slightest acknowledgment of their authorship. Ingram Bywater in the last century, encouraged by this, and observing that other parts of the work also seemed to belong to a pre-Hellenistic stratum of thought as well as being marked by an individual style which was certainly not that of Iamblichus himself, was led on to the discovery that they belonged to the lost Protrepticus of Aristotle, considerable portions of which have been in this way recovered for us by Bywater himself and others following in his footsteps. It cannot be denied that the methods employed in source-criticism, and the nature of the task itself, leave plenty of room for individual differences of opinion; but a solid foundation of generally acceptable results has gradually been obtained, of which the recovery of the Protrepticus fragments, though not relevant to our immediate subject, may serve as an outstandingly successful instance.

(4) The 'a priori' method

Besides the actual information about the early Pythagoreans which we may extract, directly or indirectly, from ancient writers, there is another resource. This has been made use of in the past, and it will be appropriate to make a brief statement of it here, though it is not so much a fresh source of evidence as a means of testing, and perhaps by inference expanding, the positive testimony.

The method is to leave aside for a time the small number of explicit statements about what the Pythagoreans of a given period actually said, and argue a priori, or from circumstantial evidence, what they are likely to have said. It starts from the assumption that we possess a certain general familiarity with other contemporary schools and individual philosophers, and with the climate of thought in which the Pythagoreans worked. This general knowledge of the evolution of Greek philosophy gives one, it is claimed, the right to make judgments of the sort that the Pythagoreans, let us say, before the time of Parmenides are likely to have held doctrine A, and that it is impossible for them at that stage of thought to have already evolved doctrine B. Examples of the application of this method in recent English scholarship are the two articles by F. M. Cornford on 'Mysticism and Science in the Pythagorean Tradition' together with their sequel in his book Plato and Parmenides, and their criticism by J. E. Raven, [in his Pythagoreans and Eleatics, 1948].

In arguments of this type, considerable weight may be attached to the generally acknowledged existence of two main streams of early Greek philosophy, the Ionian and the Italian, and the equally well established fact that the fountain-head of the Italian tradition was Pythagoras. Individual philosophers were open to the influence of one or the other of these streams, and whichever it was, being aware of the existence of both they are either openly or implicitly critical of the other. Empedocles the Sicilian is deeply imbued with the Italian ideas. Parmenides on the other hand is with good reason believed to have started as a philosopher of the Italian school, and to have rebelled against its teachings. Parmenides indeed, the most original and profound of all Presocratic thinkers, abandoned the fundamentals of all earlier systems alike, declaring any form of monistic cosmogony to be irrational and impossible; but if he had been of the Italian persuasion himself, it seems natural that he should have had its tenets particularly in mind in his criticism.

In such ways as these the development of Pythagorean thought may be reflected in the agreement or disagreement of other thinkers, and it may be possible to infer that certain Pythagorean doctrines existed in the time of Parmenides, of Zeno the Eleatic, or of Empedocles. Clearly, however, such a method may only be used with the greatest possible caution.

C. Life of Pythagoras and External History of the School

No one who has read the preceding section will suppose that an account of the life, character and achievements of Pythagoras can rest on anything stronger than probabilities; but the evidence is interesting, and certain conclusions may legitimately be drawn.

The dates of his life cannot be fixed exactly, but assuming the approximate correctness of the statement of Aristoxenus (ap. Porph. V.P. 9, DK, 14.8) that he left Samos to escape the tyranny of Polycrates at the age of forty, we may put his birth round about 570 B.C. or a few years earlier. The length of his life was variously estimated in antiquity, but it is agreed that he lived to a fairly ripe old age, and most probably he died at about seventy-five or eighty. His father Mnesarchus of Samos (the name goes back to Herodotus and Heraclitus) is described as a gem-engraver, and it would be in accordance with regular Greek custom for Pythagoras to be trained in his father's craft. We read of travels in Egypt and Babylonia, the former first mentioned by Isocrates in his Busiris. The nature of this work does not inspire confidence, and the tradition connecting Pythagoreanism with Egypt may be thought to have arisen from the general Greek respect for Egyptian wisdom, especially religious wisdom. But the same cause would naturally drive a man like Pythagoras to seek enlightenment in that quarter, and that he did so is very likely. According to Diogenes (VIII, 3), Polycrates (whether before or after his assumption of power we do not know) gave him a letter of introduction to Amasis, the Pharaoh who was the tyrant's friend and ally. The tyranny of Polycrates may be taken to have begun about 538, and it may well be that Pythagoras's disapproval of it did not reach a head until some years later. Polycrates undoubtedly succeeded in raising Samos to an unprecedented height not only of prosperity and power but also of technical achievement. To his reign belong the famous tunnel of the engineer Eupalinus (rediscovered in 1882), the great temple built by Rhoecus and the harbour mole whose line may still be traced in the water, as well as the flourishing practice of those arts to which Dr Seltman has given the combined name of celature and in which Pythagoras and his family were directly concerned. All that we know, or can guess, of Pythagoras suggests that he would be intensely interested in both the artistic and the commercial progress of the island, and in all probability, with his mathematical genius and craftsman's skill, an eager contributor to both.

But there was another side to Polycrates. He encouraged the luxury and dissipation which grew naturally with material prosperity, and in attaining his ends he could be brutal and unscrupulous. The atmosphere in which poets like Anacreon and Ibycus felt at home was not one to appeal to a preacher of the ascetic life. Whether or not political considerations played their part—Polycrates was the enemy of the old landed aristocracy of Samos—we know too little of Pythagoras's connexions and outlook to say; but political considerations are unnecessary to explain the discontent of a religious and philosophical genius at the court of a tyrant of this type.

To escape life under the tyranny, he migrated to Croton, the leading Achaean colony in South Italy. What determined his choice we cannot say, but he may have been encouraged in it by Democedes of Croton who was court physician to Polycrates. Croton was still suffering the demoralizing effects of her defeat by the Locrians at the river Sagra, and historians of the Greek West observe a marked improvement after the arrival of Pythagoras. Arriving no doubt with his reputation made, he appears to have attained without delay a position of authority and influence in the city and founded his school there. From now on the name of Pythagoras is linked indissolubly, not with the Ionian or Eastern, but with the Italian, Western schools of thought of which he is the fountain-head. Stories going back to Dicaearchus tell how when this impressive and much-travelled man arrived he so won over the elder and ruling citizens with his eloquence that they invited him to address also the younger men, the school-children and the women. Dicaearchus, it is said, as a champion of the practical life exaggerated the political activity of Pythagoras and his school, but the evidence that they took a leading part in politics is overwhelming. The Neopythagoreans, who embroidered his story in the light of their own more visionary ideas, liked to represent him as absorbed in religious and contemplative thought, but no outstanding thinker in the small society of a sixth-century city-state (as Dunbabin remarks [in his The Western Greeks]) could avoid playing some part in public affairs, nor do any of our earlier sources suggest that Pythagoras had any desire to do so. What we may say, from our knowledge of the Pythagorean philosophy, is that his motive in acquiring power (like that of his near contemporary Confucius) was not personal ambition but a zeal for reforming society according to his own moral ideas. There is no reason to doubt the general statement which we find in Diogenes (VIII, 3) that he gave the Italians a constitution and with his followers governed the state so well that it deserved the name of aristocracy ('government of the best') in its literal sense. Dunbabin gives an excellent summary of the position from the point of view of a historian of the Western Greeks:

His political influence was, however, a secondary consequence of his teaching. The moral regeneration which he wrought was the necessary condition of Krotoniate expansion, political and otherwise. We need not believe that he was invited to address the citizens on his arrival at Kroton…. His influence was no doubt more gradually felt…. There is no reason to doubt that the Pythagorean … [political clubs] did for the first half of the fifth century direct the affairs of Kroton and most of the other South Italian cities. This they will have done through the existing forms of government; the part of the [political clubs] in determining the policy of the State may be roughly compared with that of a party caucus in parliamentary government. The importance in the account… and other terms with a political meaning, and the history of the revolts against the Pythagoreans, indicate sufficiently clearly that real power was in their hands….

The tendency, as well as the reality, of Pythagoras's political influence may be illustrated by a narrative of Diodorus (XII, 9, DK, 14.14). Telys, the leader of the popular party … at Sybaris, persuaded his city to banish five hundred of its richest citizens and divide their property among the people. When these oligarchic exiles sought refuge at Croton and Telys threatened war if they were not given up, the Crotonian assembly was at first inclined to give way, and it was Pythagoras who intervened and persuaded them to protect the suppliants. The result was the campaign in which the Crotonians were led to victory by the Pythagorean Milo.

A possibility that must not be overlooked is that Pythagoras may have both introduced and designed the unique incuse coinage which was the earliest money of Croton and the neighbouring South Italian cities under her influence. This is a coinage which excites the enthusiasm of numismatists by its combination of a remarkable and difficult technique with outstanding beauty of design, and Seltman claims that its sudden appearance with no evolutionary process behind it postulates a genius of the order of Leonardo da Vinci: 'for the latter half of the sixth century B.C. there is only one name to fit this role: Pythagoras'. As the son of an engraver he would himself have been a practising artist, and of his genius there can be no doubt. One begins to appreciate the dictum of Empedocles that he was 'skilled in all manner of cunning works'.

It is scarcely possible (to put the theory in its mildest form) that Pythagoras can have had nothing to do with this apparently contemporary coinage, and this throws a light on his social position and practical interests which is not without its bearing on his philosophy. To have been responsible for the adoption of coinage, he must have belonged to the rising mercantile class with experience of the international market. This is the right sort of man to have befriended the wealthy party … when they were exiled from Sybaris, and finds support in two statements of Aristoxenus which are seldom quoted. He writes that Pythagoras 'extolled and promoted the study of numbers more than anyone, diverting it from mercantile practice and comparing everything to numbers', and in another place attributes to him the introduction of weights and measures among the Greeks. Even the earliest accounts of Pythagoras contain legendary accretions, but these prosaic statements hardly have a legendary ring, nor would the Pythagorean friends of Aristoxenus have any motive for introducing them into their idealized picture of the Master. One may suspect that the aristocracy of which Pythagoras was a leader was not simply of the old land-owning type, but had strong connexions with trade.

The ascendancy of Pythagoras and his followers was uninterrupted for some twenty years, during which Croton extended her influence over the neighbouring cities and in many of them the leading positions were occupied by members of the Pythagorean brotherhood. At the end of this period a Crotonian named Cylon stirred the people to revolt. According to Aristoxenus he was a wealthy and loose-living nobleman who acted from personal spite, having been refused admission to the Pythagorean order on moral grounds. Others, however, more plausibly allege political opposition on the grounds of the ultraconservatism of the Pythagoreans, reinforced by the suspicion and jealousy aroused by the strange and secret nature of their doctrines. The upshot of the somewhat confused account which Iamblichus (V.P. 255 ff.) retails from Apollonius seems to be that opposition came from both sides, Cylon representing the upper classes and a certain Ninon the democratic element. Ninon's indictment includes the obstruction by the Pythagoreans of attempts at popular reform. This combination of forces seems to have been due on the one hand to popular discontent with the concentration of power in the hands of a few, coupled with the ordinary man's dislike of what he considers mumbo-jumbo, and on the other to the native aristocracy's suspicion of the Pythagorean coteries…, whose assumption of superiority and esoteric knowledge must at times have been hard to bear.

In the Cylonian conspiracy a number of leading Pythagoreans were rounded up and killed (the details are variously given), and it seems to have been the signal for outbursts of anti-Pythagorean activity in other cities also, which made it difficult for Pythagoras, banished from Croton, to find a resting-place. As usual, fact and legend mingle in the story of his fate. Aristotle preserves the version that he left Croton before the attack, but since the object of this story is to demonstrate his power of prophecy, it seems to belong to the legend. According to the most credible accounts, he finally reached Metapontum, where he died. About his death there are naturally a number of more or less romantic stories, but the most probable seems to be that of Dicaearchus (D.L. VIII, 40, Porph. V.P. 57), that he was forced to take refuge in a temple of the Muses, where he starved to death.

The rebellion of Cylon, which must have taken place about the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries, seems to have caused only a very temporary check to Pythagorean activities, and their influence was even extended over the next forty or fifty years. But it was a troublous period of growing unrest, which led to a second, major anti-Pythagorean outbreak in the middle of the fifth century. In this the house at Croton that had belonged to Milo was said to have been burned down, and according to Polybius the revolutionary movement spread through the whole of Magna Graecia. Pythagorean meeting-houses were destroyed, the leading men of each city perished, and the whole region was in turmoil. This catastrophe, which is dated by Minar to 454 B.C. …, brought about the first emigration of Pythagoreans to the mainland of Greece and led to the establishment of Pythagorean centres at Phlius and Thebes. Among the youngest of the refugees Aristoxenus (Iambi. V.P. 249, DK, 14.16) mentions Lysis, who much later at Thebes became the teacher of Epaminondas. Another was Philolaus, mentioned in the Phaedo as having taught the Thebans Simmias and Cebes…. Even now, the Pythagoreans who stayed behind seem to have regained a certain amount of political influence in Italy, and to have continued their life as a society, chiefly at Rhegium. Later still, however, when in the words of Aristoxenus (Iambi. 251) 'political conditions got worse', all are said to have left Italy except Archytas of Tarentum. It is impossible to date this final exodus, but von Fritz would put it as late as 390.

We see, then, that the life of the Pythagorean societies was by no means peaceful or uninterrupted, and that from the second half of the fifth century they existed in small separate bands scattered widely over South Italy and Greece. The effect of this on the continuity of their philosophical tradition was naturally serious. Porphyry (57ff.) and Iamblichus (252f.) preserve a description of what happened which went back through Nicomachus to Neanthes in the third century B.C. It must contain a great deal of truth, and goes far to account for the inadequacy and obscurity of our material on Pythagorean doctrine. According to this tale the prominent Pythagoreans who lost their lives in the troubles carried their knowledge with them to the grave, for it had been kept secret, only those parts being divulged which would have conveyed little meaning to outsiders. Pythagoras had left no writings of his own, and only a few dim sparks of philosophy were kept alight by men like Lysis and Archippus of Tarentum who escaped, and any who were abroad at the time of the troubles. These exiles were so cast down by events that they lived in isolation, shunning the company of their fellow-men. Nevertheless, to avoid incurring divine displeasure by allowing the name of philosophy to perish altogether, they collected in note form whatever had been written down by an older generation, supplemented by their own memories. Each one left these commentaries, when and where he happened to die, in trust to son, daughter or wife, with instructions that they be kept within the household. The trust was faithfully kept, and the notebooks handed down for several generations, but our sources agree that as an active sect the Pythagorean society practically died out during the fourth century B.C. 'They preserved their original ways, and their science, although the sect was dwindling, until, not ignobly, they died out.' Thus was their epitaph written by Aristoxenus (ap. Iambi. V.P. 251), speaking of those who were his contemporaries and acquaintances.

It emerges from this troubled history, first, that the Pythagorean School continued to exist through the classical period of Greek thought in the sixth to the fourth centuries B.C., and secondly, that from the middle of the fifth century it existed in the form of separate, scattered communities in various parts of the Greek world. It is only natural that these communities should develop on different lines, and that we should hear, as we do from Aristotle, that 'some Pythagoreans' held certain doctrines and some held others, although all acknowledged allegiance to the same founder. This does not lighten our task, but at least it means that inconsistencies are no cause for despair, or for a hasty conclusion that the authorities are confused: they are no less likely to be a faithful reflexion of historical fact.