Though the island’s prosperity continued to soar, the era of Geomoroi rule had ended by the time Pythagoras was born. In the late seventh century B.C., the aristocratic Geomoroi had succumbed to a tyrannical regime. The takeover reputedly occurred while most citizens were outside the city at the temple, enjoying a festival of the goddess.
Pythagoras was born in about 570 B.C., or perhaps a little earlier. Kolaios would have returned at about that time from his heroic voyage. Though the Geomoroi had lost control of the island, Samos’ climb towards her economic and cultural zenith continued. This was her golden age. For Pythagoras’ mother’s Geomoroi family, the ascent of the tyranny must have been a serious blow in terms of power and perhaps wealth. However, Mnesarchus was a merchant whose commercial situation would have improved rather than suffered in the upheaval. Theirs was surely a fortuitous marriage, with Parthenis bringing her family’s ancient aristocratic heritage and lands, and Mnesarchus bringing a newer fortune earned in the thriving Samian mercantile empire.
Mnenarchus’ profession makes it likely that Pythagoras did not spend his entire childhood and youth on Samos. According to the historian Neanthes (one of the most reliable sources used by the three biographers), he travelled to Tyre and Italy and elsewhere with his father. Also according to Neanthes, and others as well, he had two older brothers, Eunostus and Tyrrhenus, and perhaps a foster brother to share these adventures. If the story is correct that Pythagoras’ father was not only a merchant but also a gem engraver, then his sons would have been trained in that craft. Iamblichus was sure that Pythagoras had the best possible schooling and studied with learned men on Samos and even in Syria, especially with ‘those who were experts in divinity’. It is plausible that the family continued to have trading or personal connections with the area around Sidon, in Syria, where Iamblichus’ biography said Pythagoras was born.
Describing Pythagoras as a youth, Iamblichus strayed into the overblown adulation that he would adopt in later chapters of his book, but a more realistic picture emerges of a young man gifted with a natural grace and manner of speech and behaviour that made a good impression even on people much older than himself. Iamblichus wrote that he was serene, thoughtful, and without eccentricity. Statues in Samos’ museums – kouroi, dating from that period – suggest that this was the ideal: a human youth, but hinting at something more centred, mysterious, and holy.
On Samos, Pythagoras was at the epicentre of the commercial world, but not at the epicentre of Greek science and natural philosophy. He was, however, only a narrow strait away from Miletus, where Thales, called ‘the first to introduce the study of nature to the Greeks’, had his headquarters. About fifteen years before Pythagoras’ birth, Thales observed and recorded an eclipse. That event has been taken to mark, or at least to symbolise, the beginning of Greek science and natural philosophy, and, because Thales’ observation was an eclipse, it is possible to identify the date: May 28, 585 B.C.
Little is known about Thales except that he studied nature and astronomy and, unsatisfied with mythological explanations, pondered questions about how the world began and what was there before anything else. Plato, in his dialogue Theaetetus, used Thales as an example of a man too preoccupied with his studies:
Thales, when he was star-gazing and looking upward, fell into a well and was rallied (so it is said) by a clever and pretty maidservant from Thrace, because he was eager to know what went on in the heaven but did not notice what was in front of him, nay, at his very feet.6
Thales did have a practical side. He was famous for coming up with simple, ingenious solutions to problems that stumped others. News probably reached Samos, if the story was true (and even if it was not), that when the army of King Croesus, of fabled wealth, was brought to a standstill for lack of a bridge over the river Halys, Thales had a channel dug upstream of their position that diverted the river to the other side of the army, so that without having moved a step they found they had crossed it.7
It might be said that Thales had a special affinity for water, be it in the river or the well, for he thought that water itself was the first principle from which all other things had sprung, and that the world itself floats on water ‘like a log or something else of that sort’, as Aristotle later commented a bit dismissively. Pythagoras’ biographer Diogenes Laertius wrote that Thales lived to be so old that he ‘could no longer see the stars from the earth’. He was known as one of the ‘Seven Sages’ of early Greek history, each of whom was connected with one great saying; Thales’ was ‘Water is best.’ Would that all philosophers had been so concise.
Growing up on Samos, Pythagoras surely knew about Thales. Iamblichus thought that he made trips across the strait even in his early youth to sit at the feet of the elderly sage. Pythagoras acquired a nickname: ‘the long-haired Samian’. Apollonius the wonder-worker provided Pythagoras’ biographers with the information that Pythagoras also studied with the astronomer Anaximander, another scholar at Miletus. As was true of Thales, one date is fairly firmly associated with Anaximander: he was sixty-four years old when he died in 546. He would have been in his mid-twenties when Thales recorded the eclipse, and middle-aged to elderly by the time Pythagoras could have been his pupil.
Anaximander himself may have been a pupil of Thales, but their ideas were not alike. Anaximander used mathematics and geometry in attempts to chart the heavens and the Earth, and he drew one of the earliest maps of the world. To a young man eager to acquire cutting-edge knowledge, it would have been intriguing to learn that Anaximander rejected ideas that the Earth floated on anything or hung from anything or was supported from elsewhere in the heavens. The Earth, said Anaximander, remains motionless and in place because the universe is symmetrical and the Earth has no reason to move in one direction and not another. He introduced the notion of the ‘limitless’ or ‘unlimited’ as fundamental to all things. This idea surfaced again prominently when Pythagorean doctrine was written down by Philolaus in the next century.
For Anaximander, when the ‘unlimited’ was ‘separated’, the result was contrasts, such as male-female, even-odd, hot-cold. Contrasts were central to his creation scheme. Separation into opposites later became a major element in Pythagorean thinking. Most significantly, Anaximander believed that there was unity underlying all the contrasts, diversity, and multiplicity in the universe – an idea that would emerge much more strongly with the Pythagoreans. The parallels between Anaximander and the Pythagoreans might seem to indicate that Pythagoras must have studied with Anaximander, but Anaximander’s ideas could have reached Pythagoras or Philolaus by other routes. The young Pythagoras may also have known Anaximander’s pupil Anaximenes.
Iamblichus credited Thales with convincing Pythagoras to travel to Egypt. This kindly, modest teacher, wrote Iamblichus, apologised for his extreme old age and the ‘imbecility of his body’ and urged his talented pupil to move on, claiming that his own wisdom was in part derived from the Egyptians and that Pythagoras was even better equipped than he had been to benefit from their teaching. Thales had either visited Egypt or knew it from the accounts of others, for he wrote a description of the Nile floods (water, again) and speculated that they were caused by winds blowing from the north in the summer, which prevented the waters of the river from flowing into the Mediterranean.8 Porphyry thought that what Thales and Pythagoras had most to learn from the Egyptians was geometry: ‘The ancient Egyptians excelled in geometry, the Phoenicians in numbers and proportions, and the Chaldeans in astronomical theorems, divine rites, and worship of the gods.’ ‘It is said’, Porphyry hedged, that Pythagoras learned from all of them.9
Recounting the tales and traditions about Pythagoras’ associations with Thales, Anaximander, and possibly Anaximenes on the mainland coast near Samos, and the educational odyssey he was about to undertake, Porphyry and Iamblichus resorted often to those words ‘it is said’, without revealing who said it. The stories were part of a long-standing semi-historical
tradition. Unfortunately, in the centuries preceding Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Diogenes Laertius, this tradition had been embellished to the point of pollution by a spate of ‘pseudo-Pythagorean’ literature. The three historians tried to circumvent this problem by using earlier sources, but they could not, or at least did not, completely disregard some information that was probably spurious.
The tradition that Pythagoras studied with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes and even visited Egypt and Mesopotamia is not far-fetched. Samos’ position in the world geographically and economically, and what seems probable about Pythagoras’ own economic circumstances and family, make these stories credible. He had reason to feel comfortable in the wider world because of his father’s trading ventures and connections, was wealthy enough to travel and have the leisure to pursue an adventurous, eclectic self-education, and was probably insatiably curious. If Pythagoras did not make journeys like these, what could have prevented him?
Iamblichus wrote that Thales did not stop at telling Pythagoras he should go to Egypt. He warned him to be sparing of his time and careful about what he ate. Pythagoras confined himself to ‘such nutriment as was slender and easy of digestion’ so that his sleep could be short, his ‘soul vigilant and pure’, and his body in a state of ‘perfect and invariable health’. Perhaps he did follow his old teacher’s advice and succeed in maintaining this enviable conditioning, but according to Iamblichus, he did not immediately hasten to Egypt. He went by way of Sidon, probably his birthplace.
[1] The stories of the three biographers themselves are in Chapter 13.
CHAPTER 2
‘Entirely different from the institutions of the Greeks’
Sixth Century B.C.
Young Pythagoras’ journey, as Iamblichus recounted it, was the ancient equivalent of a high-risk modern junior year abroad. He bedded down in a temple on the Mediterranean coast, at the foot of Mount Carmel, a mountain associated with the prophet Elijah and his God as well as with local pagan deities. There is a much-disputed claim by the historian Josephus that Pythagoras was influenced by Jewish teaching. He could have encountered it here, although many of the Jewish population were in exile in Babylon. Iamblichus wrote that he ‘conversed with prophets’ and was initiated into the mysteries of Byblos and Tyre, not for the sake of superstition, but ‘from an anxiety that nothing might escape his observation which deserved to be learnt in the arcane or mysteries of the gods’. For a man who himself lived in a superstitious age, Iamblichus was surprisingly eager to emphasise that Pythagoras was not influenced by the ‘superstition’ of this area, though he made no such disclaimer about what Pythagoras might have picked up in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Iamblichus was writing at a time when many feared that Christianity, with roots in Jewish belief, would destroy Greek philosophy.
After a while, Pythagoras continued his journey to Egypt, and Iamblichus went into greater narrative detail than usual to relate an adventurous, delightful story. Fortuitously, or so it seemed at first, an Egyptian ship landed on the Phoenician coast near the temple where Pythagoras was living. The sailors were pleased to welcome him aboard, thinking they could sell such a comely young man at a good price. During the voyage, they changed their minds. There was something different about this modest youth from what one normally expected of a human being. The sailors reminded one another how he had appeared, descending the sacred Mount Carmel, how he had said nothing except to ask, ‘Are you bound for Egypt?’ and then had come aboard and sat silently and out of their way for two nights and three days without taking food or drink, or sleeping – at least when any of them were watching. The voyage was, furthermore, going exceptionally well, with fair weather and favourable winds. The sailors delivered Pythagoras safely to the Egyptian coast and helped him off the ship (he was weak from fasting and lack of sleep), then built an altar in front of him and heaped it with fruit. When they left, he ravenously consumed the fruit. One may take this story as evidence of his godlike nature, or as suggesting that he was a canny young traveller, giving careful attention to self-preservation.
Iamblichus’ sources indicated that in Egypt Pythagoras frequented temples, sat at the feet of priests and prophets, sought out men celebrated for their wisdom, and visited ‘any place in which he thought something more excellent might be found’, ‘astronomising and geometrising’. Isocrates, an older contemporary of Plato in the early fourth century B.C., eagerly latched on to the information that Pythagoras spent time in Egypt. Isocrates was intent on showing that the Greeks owed their learning to the Egyptians and had added very little. In his disparaging words, Pythagoras ‘went to Egypt, and having become their pupil was the first to introduce philosophy in general to Greece, and concerned himself more conspicuously than anyone else, with matters to do with sacrifices and temple purifications, thinking that even if this would gain him no advantage from the gods it would at least bring him high repute among men. And that is what happened.’ As in the tale of Pythagoras’ sagacious handling of the Egyptian sailors, here is a hint that for all his reputed purity, he was not naive but perhaps even rather opportunistic.
Egypt at the time when Pythagoras could have been there was ruled by the pharaoh Amasis II (Ahmose II), later an acquaintance of Samos’ tyrant Polykrates. It was unusual but not unprecedented for a Greek to visit Egypt. In the seventh century B.C., the pharaoh Psamtek I had hired Greek mercenaries, and in Pythagoras’ day there were Greeks living in Naukratis in the Nile delta, for Amasis was eager to promote trade with the Greek cities and even made a donation towards a rebuilding project at Delphi. However, he restricted Greek merchants to the one city and did not allow them to move around the country as much as Pythagoras is supposed to have done.
Porphyry reported a different version of Pythagoras’ Egyptian sojourn. His source was On Illustrious Virtuous Men, by Antiphon. By this account, Pythagoras set off with a letter of introduction from Polykrates to Amasis. This would place the journey too late, for Polykrates’ reign began in 535, shortly before Pythagoras moved to Croton. Nevertheless, Porphyry’s account is interesting: Pythagoras went first to the priests of Heliopolis, who sent him on to Memphis, saying the priests there were more ancient. These, in turn, on the same excuse, sent him to Diospolis (ancient Thebes), a journey of more than three hundred miles to the south. The priests of Diospolis had nowhere else to send him, but thought that if they made things difficult enough he would go away. They gave him ‘very hard precepts, entirely different from the institutions of the Greeks’, which he doggedly performed, winning their admiration to the extent that they taught him their secret wisdom and permitted him to sacrifice to their gods, something not normally allowed a foreigner. Pythagoras would later adopt the practice of secretiveness with respect to his own teachings, as was not common in the Greek world.
If Pythagoras did go to Egypt, what could he have learned? In the temple complexes there were ‘Houses of Life’ with many learned men copying manuscripts, large libraries, and sometimes schools. The ruling classes were literate, as we must suppose Pythagoras was, but he did not know the languages of Egypt. If the priests accepted him, as Porphyry believes they must have, then Pythagoras, though older than the schoolboys, would have had to start on an elementary level with a language, alphabet, and numbers that were foreign to him, before he could begin to understand priestly liturgy and wisdom. He would have studied the cursive hieratic script, perhaps copied out books of Egyptian literature, then advanced to hieroglyphs. He would have learned a decimal system with numbers the equivalent of 1, 10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000, but no symbol for zero. To multiply, an Egyptian added a number to itself the necessary number of times. To divide, he subtracted a number from itself until the remainder was too small to continue. Pi was unknown, but one could come close to calculating the area of a circle by measuring the diameter, subtracting 1/9, and squaring the result.
Such mathematical knowledge was for practical use: for construction or – whe
n it came to the circle – for measuring such things as the capacity of a granary – but this was a culture whose worldview seamlessly included what was tangible physical fact and what was mythological or metaphorical, drawing no boundaries between practical and esoteric knowledge, or between everyday reality and the holy. The Egyptians’ elaborate preparations for another world after death had a practical motive: to supply what one needed to get there and live there. Magic was a high category of knowledge, as were religious ritual, myth, and medicine. Pythagoras would have studied the Egyptian hierarchy of gods and goddesses and beliefs about the afterlife, but not a doctrine of reincarnation.1 He also would not have learned vegetarianism, for the upper classes ate beef and other meat fairly often.
The Egyptians had long excelled in surveying. The near perfect squareness and north–south orientation of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza is evidence of their astounding precision, and Pythagoras could not have missed seeing that pyramid if he travelled as Porphyry thought he did. It dated from about 2500 B.C., two thousand years before him. We cannot know with certainty that the Egyptians in the sixth century still had the technical genius of those distant predecessors, but surveying for land boundaries, city plans, and buildings was routine, and the older, magnificent structures that are still wonders of the world today were much fresher and much more impressive to someone who had not encountered human-made objects on this scale.
From the temple roofs, Pythagoras might have assisted with observations of the cycles of the moon and the movements of the stars and learned how these were related to the Egyptian twelve-month calendar and 365-day year. Egyptians thought their country was the centre of the cosmos and that there were definite connections between the stars and events on Earth. For example, the star Sirius (Sopdet), invisible for several months, reappeared in mid-July as a morning star, signalling the onset of the yearly inundation of the Nile and the beginning of the new year.
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