hecatomb:
A hundred cows, give or a take a few moos.
That didn’t stop Pythagoras’s reputation from snowballing. People began to attribute all sorts of math-y things to him. They would write out their own findings and sign Pythagoras’s name at the bottom in a sort of reverse form of plagiarism. They hoped attaching his name would give their ideas more legitimacy. Today, it’d be like writing a groundbreaking essay on the power of baking soda for science fair volcanoes and then signing both your name and Marie Curie’s name as the authors.
Marie Curie:
A famous nineteenth-and twentieth-century chemist who got a little too friendly with deadly chemicals.
Your teacher has to give you an A, right? Marie Curie helped you write the essay.
Just to be clear, Pythagoras had about as much to do with all of these discoveries as a bean.
Just like Nessie
The real Pythagoras is as elusive as the Loch Ness monster, and just like Nessie, he’s been giving us the slip for thousands of years. That’s because the most detailed stories of Pythagoras come from men living in the third century CE. When you do the math, that’s eight hundred years after Pythagoras kicked the bucket (for the fifth time, at least, according to him).
It was like a massive game of telephone. If a story can change in only a few minutes, imagine how much it can change in a few hundred years. The later writers looked at earlier sources and came to their own conclusions, which is what you call really bad research.
Diogenes Laertius used earlier sources such as Plato and Aristotle. He wrote about 200 CE, and mentioned a guy named Pythagoras who had a bunch of followers, who found the answer to a right triangle, and who sacrificed a hecatomb upon its discovery.
Iamblichus, a Syrian philosopher from 300 CE, had a bit of a different agenda. If Pythagoras had been alive to hear his words, his head would’ve swelled so much it might have exploded. Iamblichus claimed that Pythagoras invented political education, coined the word “philosophy,” and overthrew despots (in addition to all the math stuff, of course). According to Iamblichus, Pythagoras knew how to talk with bulls, and he was really handsome. Obviously. You don’t get to be that famous without being good looking.
However, it wasn’t just people in the ancient world fighting to be president of the Pythagoras fan club. In 1632, Galileo got in on the action. In his famous treatise, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, he claimed that Pythagoras first discovered the proof for a right triangle. We’ll forgive Galileo, however, since he didn’t have the internet back then to check his research.
This is a how a legend is born, but just because it’s old and passed on for hundreds of years, doesn’t mean it’s true. In fact, it probably means the opposite. It seems that the only thing Pythagoras did really well was to trust his followers to spread the good news about him.
The Real Reason Hippasus Got the Boot
The Pythagoreans were split into two sides: the acusmatici and the mathêmatici. The acusmatici emphasized the religious ideas Pythagoras was known for and all those crazy rules. The mathêmatici preferred math and numbers. Both claimed to be the closest to Pythagoras’s true teachings, and as a result, things got nasty between the two groups. The acusmatici accused the mathêmatici of really descending from Hippasus and his love of numbers. The mathêmatici denied it and figuratively threw Hippasus under the bus. (And this was after they threw him over the side of the boat! Poor Hippasus.) No one liked Hippasus anymore even though he is the first mathematician and music theorist in the Pythagorean tradition, at least that we know of. That’s what you call the raw end of a deal.
The Common Denominator
So we do know one more thing for certain: Pythagoras was the head of a religious cult, and not the leader of a bunch of nerdy guys sitting around scratching math equations in the dirt with a stick. Attributing all those discoveries to him would be like claiming Buddha discovered the theory of relativity. Sorry, Einstein.
So why study a man who clearly had nothing to do with inventing the Pythagorean Theorem and who probably didn’t even give a hoot about math?
Liar, liar, chiton on fire.
Because Pythagoras was a superstar during his time, and even centuries after. Instead of being known for singing catchy tunes or throwing wild parties, he was known as a shaman. He influenced scores of people—the Pythagoreans—and Western thought for generations to come, even if he didn’t do a lot of that thinking himself. When math students learn about the history behind their equations, his name is still one of the most common in textbooks.
When Copernicus was studying the earth’s relationship to the sun, he didn’t name his findings after himself, but after Pythagoras. (Sound familiar?) He originally called his findings, Astronomia Pythagorica. (It wasn’t until later that the world started calling them the Copernican Revolution.) Copernicus’s findings started the sixteenth century Scientific Revolution, two thousand years after Pythagoras lived; but somehow, Pythagoras still gets at least partial credit.
Obviously, someone had to discover the theorem of the right triangle, even if it wasn’t Pythagoras. So who was it? Well, scholars don’t exactly know. Some cuneiform tablets seem to prove that the Babylonians knew about the whole triangle business at least a thousand years before Pythagoras was even born. The Chinese and Indians were all over geometry, too. There wasn’t a ton of contact between these cultures at the time, so it’s doubtful that they copied each other. They probably each discovered it independently.
The first known proofs of the theorem come from The Elements by Euclid, another famous Greek living about 250 BCE (or did he? We have no evidence on him either). Clearly, the Greeks loved their numbers.
Leguminophobia?
Pythagoras probably had an eventful life, even if scholars don’t actually know what the events were. Perhaps the most enduring legend around Pythogoras’s life centers on the way he died—by beans. Which is a little like someone with anthophobia (a fear of flowers) accidentally brushing up against a petunia and dying from an allergic reaction. Guess they were right in the end to be afraid.
According to the story, Pythagoras’s cool kids’ club had started to rub people the wrong way. It was secretive, exclusive, and a bit spooky with all its mysticism. So one night, some disgruntled locals decided to do something about the weird hippie living down the street. Setting his house on fire seemed like a good solution.
Pythagoras managed to escape, only as someone with his head in the clouds all day he didn’t know his neighborhood very well. He took off with the pyromaniacs in hot pursuit and ran straight into a bean field. When he realized his mistake, he refused to take one step farther, even if it meant escape. Instead, Pythagoras screamed that he would rather die by savages than trample beans, and so he did.
Hopefully, when he was reborn, it wasn’t as a bean farmer’s son.
Chapter
4
Hiawatha
Incarnation of Wisdom
Lived: Fifteenth century, North America
Occupation: Cannibal-turned-Peacemaker
Scrambled Names
If you’re into nineteenth-century poetry (and who isn’t?), then you may at first confuse our Hiawatha, creator of the Iroquois Confederacy, with the Hiawatha of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, The Song of Hiawatha. Easy mistake. It turns out that even Longfellow, the famous American poet, was confused. His poem details—in typical Romantic exaggeration—the exploits of men from the Chippewa tribe, possibly one in particular named Manabozho, but he called him Hiawatha of the Iroquois. Which is a little like confusing a New Zealander for an Aussie. Big mistake.
Longfellow thought the name Hiawatha was just another nickname for the Chippewa men. He also thought it sounded cooler and more poetic than Manabozho, which is debatable. Longfellow’s Hiawatha had lots of adventures, like slaying evil magicians and inventing writing, but eventually he saw the light and became Christian. Our Hiawatha did no such things.
So while Longf
ellow’s Hiawatha never existed, the real Hiawatha (possibly) did and so (possibly) did his buddy, the Great Peacemaker. Together, this dynamic duo brought peace to the various Iroquoian tribes and created the first republic—something the American Founding Fathers copied for their own republic as brazenly as a schoolyard bully before class.
cannibals:
They enjoy tasty morsels of their fellow human beings.
Through centuries of retelling his story, the real Hiawatha got lost under the weight of Longfellow’s poem and his own legends. Legends filled with cannibals and murderers. As usual, the truth has a hard time competing with cannibals. The world hasn’t known the real Hiawatha since.
Reforming a Cannibal
Before we get to the cannibals, however, you’re probably wondering how the Great Peacemaker got such an awesome nickname when his real name was Dekanawida. Well, it certainly wasn’t by killing and eating people. Even as a kid, Dekanawida refused to play any violent, war-like games. Instead, he preferred talking about his feelings and hanging out with his mom to throwing sticks at kids’ heads.
Yes, the Great Peacemaker was always destined for greatness. The prophecy at his birth even said so. The prophecy also claimed that he would bring about the end of his people, the Hurons, for his efforts. His grandmother didn’t like the sound of that and took a couple cracks at killing Dekanawida when he was an infant. Don’t worry, none of the attempts stuck, but his people still didn’t trust him. It didn’t help that he stammered when he got excited.
When Dekanawida grew up, he left the Huron people to preach peace to other tribes. His stuttering, however, squashed that dream. Through the grapevine, Dekanawida heard of a great medicine man who had lost his entire family to a murderer. In his grief, the medicine man had become a hermit. Oh yeah, he also ate people.
Before the cannibal thing got in the way, this man preached peace, just like Dekanawida. Better yet, he didn’t stammer. Dekanawida saw a great opportunity in this hermit; the bad habit of boiling limbs was just a minor roadblock. The hermit, of course, was named Hiawatha.
The Great Peacemaker sought him out, hoping to change Hiawatha’s mind and become his partner in peace, despite the fact that Hiawatha was busy stewing human limbs in his crockpot. It was definitely a strange first meeting for a couple of guys interested in peace. Luckily, it didn’t take much convincing for Hiawatha to put down the femur and follow Dekanawida into the light.
So to whom exactly were Hiawatha and Dekanawida planning on preaching? (Hint: it’s not the choir. Mostly because Christianity and their choirs didn’t arrive in North America until much later.)
Women in Charge
Thanks to culturally insensitive European explorers and their “dear diaries,” history thinks of North America as a Disney movie.
Disney movie:
The one where Pocahontas and all her animal friends canoed down lazy rivers and ran around meadows singing happy songs. P. S. Talking willow trees and pet raccoons were never normal in North America.
We imagine a pure land where the inhabitants skipped around picking berries all day, hung out with animals, and lived in bliss before the white settlers arrived.
This is false. The native tribes of North America had human problems, just like the incoming white settlers, because, well, they were human, just like the white settlers. (Although some Europeans convinced themselves those super tanned Indians might not actually be human.)
With regular problems like murder and revenge in the pure land of North America, it was up to two guys to form a multi-nation alliance between the tribes.
multi-nation alliance:
It’s hard to put an exact date on this pact, but it usually ranges from 1100 to 1660. Yes, this is a big range, which means no one knows.
In this pre-settler time, the people living in what is now upstate New York weren’t much different than the Italians with their vendettas in the same period. Five tribes in particular were in a constant state of murder and revenge. We call them the Iroquois today, even though Iroquois is really a shared language and custom. The people who spoke it called themselves Haudenosaunee, which means People of the Longhouse. As you can probably guess, they lived in long houses.
Grandma's in charge.
Their lives centered on these longhouses, where multiple generations of one family lived in a single wooden structure. Sometimes up to sixty people lived together. Grandma lived in the front of the house, and she was always in charge because this was a matrilineal society. Matrilineal, in a nutshell, means that women tell the men where to be, when to be there, and what to do once they get there. When a man got married, he moved in with his wife’s family—at the back end of their longhouse.
The system worked out great. Men went off to war and hunted, while women got down to the business of running the village. But the relentless warfare against their fellow Iroquois was seriously getting in the way of living.
The Great Law of Peace
All Hiawatha and Dekanawida had to do was get five separate tribes to agree to meet at a council. The five tribes included the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca. History doesn’t know for sure, but Hiawatha was either a Mohawk or an Onondaga.
The two men traveled to each tribe to speak with their sachems (chiefs) and explain their plan for peace.
Each tribe could stay separate—that was most important. This Great Peace would connect the tribes through their shared culture and language, but each tribe would remain distinct. The whole point was to stop burying the hatchet in each other and bury it under the White Tree of Peace instead. (Although, before white settlers, hatchets weren’t really used in war. They killed each other with spears, clubs, and arrows.)
If a problem arose that affected all the tribes, a Great Council would be called. Each tribe would send their elected sachems to voice their tribe’s concerns. The sachems were men, but the women did the electing (and de-electing, if necessary) and before the sachems left, the women told them what to say at the meeting. The council would then collectively decide how to solve the conflict. They also would decide other things, like who they should make war on when the five tribes agreed on peace. (The Algonquins and Hurons were always a popular choice.)
The League of the Iroquois was sort of like the United Nations of today: separate nations coming together to solve shared problems—except with no nuclear weapons.
All the tribes seemed to be on board with this new league except for the sticky issue of revenge killings. If the tribes all lived in peace, what happened when someone was murdered? Fortunately, Hiawatha had an answer for this dilemma.
It’s hard to put a price on a human life, but Hiawatha managed fine enough. He figured that ten strings of wampum beads per male and twenty per female ought to cover the cost of any murdered person. An extra twenty beads would even save the killer’s own life.
laws:
Today, a reading of the Great Laws can take up to four eight-hour days. That’s a lot of laws.
Beads may not sound like a lot to you, but they were the hot commodity of the day. The beads weren’t used as money, but instead, wampum beads were traded and were used to propose marriage. They could even be woven together like a belt to tell a story, to show authority, to signify an adoption, to carry a message, or to stand as a memory aide when remembering all of Hiawatha and Dekanawida’s laws.
They were the perfect thing to give in retribution for a murder, and it was way better than an endless cycle of revenge killings.
The laws set down by Hiawatha and Dekanawida provided the foundation for the League of the Iroquois (also called the Iroquois Confederacy). The Wampum Belt showed the five nations with a line connecting them, but never running through them. Equal, but separate. The stage was set; peace was so close the two men could practically taste it.
The last thing standing in their way was a man Hiawatha knew a little too well—a nasty sort of fellow named Tadodaho, and a fellow cannibal. But the cannibal thing wasn’t the re
ason why Hiawatha knew him. There was no “I heart brains and hearts club.” No, they knew each other because Tadodaho had murdered Hiawatha’s family.
He struck more fear into the Iroquois than finding a worm lurking in that apple you’re about to nosh on. None of the other tribes wanted to join in the Great Law of Peace because Tadodaho promised to make their life miserable if he let them live at all. And the tribes couldn’t just give Tadodaho the cold shoulder—he might decide to eat that shoulder instead.
Dekanawida suggested that Hiawatha convince Tadodaho to join the league by talking to him. Probably because it takes one to know one, and by that, Dekanawida meant they were both as disturbed as Hannibal Lector (yet another cannibal).
It Takes One to Know One
Hiawatha was understandably nervous as he and Dekanawida approached Tadodaho to discuss the league with him. According to legend, the guy had snakes living in his hair and he was munching on a victim right then and there. If the talk didn’t go well, he might decide to make them a part of the menu with a side of olive branch. Dekanawida knew he’d be fine—he was too handsome to be killed. Hiawatha, on the other hand, had reasons to be afraid, since this was the man who killed his whole family.
Practically Medusa.
Hiawatha proceeded very carefully as he approached Tadodaho. He began by using his lyrical voice to sooth the monstrous man, which got him close enough to discover the problem. Turns out, Tadodaho had relentless headaches caused by all that pent-up meanness. Since Hiawatha used to be a medicine man, he made some tea for him to drink and combed the snakes out of Tadodaho’s hair. Tadodaho, in turn, realized that he was tired of war and revenge, and of not having any friends. It didn’t take long for Hiawatha to talk him into joining their league as none other than the official host of the council—called the fire keeper.
Famous Phonies Page 4