Diogenes Laërtius — Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book VIII (Pythagoras)

36. This is what Alexander says that he found in the Pythagorean memoirs.[26] What follows is Aristotle's.

But Pythagoras's great dignity not even Timon overlooked, who, although he digs at him in his Silli,[27] speaks of

Pythagoras, inclined to witching works and ways,

Man-snarer, fond of noble periphrase.

Xenophanes[28] confirms the statement about his having been different people at different times in the elegiacs beginning:

Now other thoughts, another path, I show.

What he says of him is as follows:

They say that, passing a belaboured whelp,

He, full of pity, spake these words of dole:

"Stay, smite not ! 'Tis a friend, a human soul;

I knew him straight whenas I heard him yelp !"

37. Thus Xenophanes. But Cratinus also lampooned him both in the Pythagorizing Woman and also in The Tarentines, where we read:[29]

They are wont,

If haply they a foreigner do find,

To hold a cross-examination

Of doctrines' worth, to trouble and confound him

With terms, equations, and antitheses

Brain-bung'd with magnitudes and periphrases.

Again, Mnesimachus in the Alcmaeon:[30]

To Loxias we sacrifice: Pythagoras his rite,

Of nothing that is animate we ever take a bite.

38. And Aristophon in the Pythagorist:[31]

a. He told how he travelled in Hades and looked on the dwellers below,

How each of them lives, but how different by far from the lives of the dead

Were the lives of the Pythagoreans, for these alone, so he said,

Were suffered to dine with King Pluto, which was for their piety's sake.

b. What an ill-tempered god for whom such swine, such creatures good company make;

and in the same later:

Their food is just greens, and to wet it pure water is all that they drink;

And the want of a bath, and the vermin, and their old threadbare coats so do stink

That none of the rest will come near them.

39. Pythagoras met his death in this wise.[32] As he sat one day among his acquaintances at the house of Milo, it chanced that the house was set ablaze out of jealousy by one of the people who were not accounted worthy of admittance to his presence, though some say it was the work of the inhabitants of Croton anxious to safeguard themselves against the setting-up of a tyranny. Pythagoras was caught as he tried to escape; he got as far as a certain field of beans, where he stopped, saying he would be captured rather than cross it, and be killed rather than prate about his doctrines; and so his pursuers cut his throat.[33] So also were murdered more than half of his disciples, to the number of forty or thereabouts; but a very few escaped, including Archippus of Tarentum and Lysis, already mentioned.

40. Dicaearchus, however, says that Pythagoras died a fugitive in the temple of the Muses at Metapontum after forty days' starvation. Heraclides, in his Epitome of the Lives of Satyrus, says that, after burying Pherecydes at Delos, he returned to Italy and, when he found Cylon of Croton giving a luxurious banquet to all and sundry, retired to Metapontum to end his days there by starvation, having no wish to live longer. On the other hand, Hermippus relates that, when the men of Agrigentum and Syracuse were at war, Pythagoras and his disciples went out and fought in the van of the army of the Agrigentines, and, their line being turned, he was killed by the Syracusans as he was trying to avoid the beanfield; the rest, about thirty-five in number, were burned at the stake in Tarentum for trying to set up a government in opposition to those in power.

41. 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 their wives to him in hopes that they would learn some of his doctrines; and so they were called Pythagorean women. Thus far Hermippus.

42. 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."

43. They also had a son Telauges, who succeeded his father and, according to some, was Empedocles' instructor. At all events Hippobotus makes Empedocles say:[34]

Son of Theano and Pythagoras.

Telauges wrote nothing, so far as we know, but his mother Theano wrote a few things. Further, a story is told that being asked how many days it was before a woman becomes pure after intercourse, she replied, "With her own husband at once, with another man never." And she advised a woman going in to her own husband to put off her shame with her clothes, and on leaving him to put it on again along with them. Asked "Put on what?" she replied, "What makes me to be called a woman."

44. 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:[35]

Not thou alone from all things animate

Didst keep, Pythagoras. All food is dead

When boil'd and bak'd and salt-besprinkle-d;

For then it surely is inanimate.

So wise was wise Pythagoras that he

Would touch no meats, but called it impious,

Bade others eat. Good wisdom: not for us

To do the wrong; let others impious be.

45. And again:[37]

If thou wouldst know the mind of old Pythagoras,

Look on Euphorbus' buckler and its boss.

He says "I've lived before." If, when he says he was,

He was not, he was no-one when he was.

And again, of the manner of his death:[38]

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[39] and his school lasted until the ninth or tenth generation. 46. 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 [40], and to whom was applied the phrase, "The Master said" (Ipse dixit), which passed into a proverb of ordinary life. 47. 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,[41] 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; 48. this is declared by Theaetetus's epigram:[42]

Know'st one Pythagoras, long-haired Pythagoras,

The far-fam'd boxer of the Samians?

I am Pythagoras; ask the Elians

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,[43] though Theophrastus says it was Parmenides, and Zeno that it was Hesiod. 49. It is said that Cylon was a rival of Pythagoras, as Antilochus[44] was of Socrates.

Pythagoras the athlete was also the subject of another epigram as follows:[45]

Gone to box with other lads

Is the lad Pythagoras,

Gone to the games Olympian

Crates' son the Samian.

The philosopher also wrote the following letter:

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. 50. For always to scan the heavens is not well, but more seemly is it to be provident for one's mother country. For I too am not altogether in my discourses but am found no less in the wars which the Italians wage with one another."

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.

Empedocles

51. Empedocles was, according to Hippobotus, the son of Meton and grandson of Empedocles, and was a native of Agrigentum. This is confirmed by Timaeus in the fifteenth book of his Histories, and he adds that Empedocles, the poet's grandfather, had been a man of distinction. Hermippus also agrees with Timaeus. So, too, Heraclides, in his treatise On Diseases,[46] says that he was of an illustrious family, his grandfather having kept racehorses. Eratosthenes also in his Olympic Victories records, on the authority of Aristotle, that the father of Meton was a victor in the 71st Olympiad.[47] 52. The grammarian Apollodorus in his Chronology tells us that

He was the son of Meton, and Glaucus says he went to Thurii, just then founded.[48]

Then farther on he adds:

Those who relate that, being exiled from his home, he went to Syracuse and fought in their ranks against the Athenians seem, in my judgement at least, to be completely mistaken. For by that time either he was no longer living or in extreme old age, which is inconsistent with the story.

For Aristotle and Heraclides both affirm that he died at the age of sixty. The victor with the riding-horse in the 71st Olympiad was

This man's namesake and grandfather,

so that Apollodorus in one and the same passage indicates the date as well as the fact.

53. But Satyrus in his Lives states that Empedocles was the son of Exaenetus and himself left a son named Exaenetus, and that in the same Olympiad Empedocles himself was victorious in the horse-race and his son in wrestling, or, as Heraclides[49] in his Epitome has it, in the foot-race. I found[50] in the Memorabilia of Favorinus a statement that Empedocles feasted the sacred envoys on a sacrificial ox made of honey and barley-meal, and that he had a brother named Callicratides. Telauges, the son of Pythagoras, in his letter to Philolaus calls Empedocles the son of Archinomus.

54. That he belonged to Agrigentum in Sicily he himself testifies at the beginning of his Purifications:[51]

My friends, who dwell in the great city sloping down to yellow Acragas, hard by the citadel.

So much for his family.

Timaeus in the ninth book of his Histories says he was a pupil of Pythagoras, adding that, having been convicted at that time of stealing his discourses, he was, like Plato, excluded from taking part in the discussions of the school; and further, that Empedocles himself mentions Pythagoras in the lines:[52]