Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  18 By “don’t stir fire with a knife” he meant, don’t provoke the anger and swelled heads of the mighty; “don’t step over the bar of a scale” means, don’t transgress the bounds of what is fair and just; “don’t sit down on your bushel” means, take equal thought for today and the future, since a bushel is a day’s rations; by “don’t eat your heart” he meant, don’t waste your life on sorrows and pains; by “when leaving on a journey, don’t turn back at the border” he was advising those who are departing life not to set their hearts on living, or be attracted by its pleasures. I refrain from interpreting the others, so as not to prolong the discussion.

  Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism, by Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, c. 1618–1630.

  19,20,21 Above all, he forbade the consumption of red mullet and blacktail,41 and he prescribed abstention from animal hearts and from beans, and, at certain times, according to Aristotle, swine-womb and gurnard.42 Some say he contented himself with honey only, or with honeycomb, or with bread, and took no wine in the daytime; for a delicacy, he limited himself to vegetables, both boiled and raw, and took seafood very rarely. His robe was white and spotless, and his quilts were of white wool. For linen had not yet reached those parts. He was never known to be afflicted with diarrhea, to have sexual relations, or to be drunk. He refrained from laughter and all pandering to a taste for coarse jokes and vulgar tales. He would punish no man, whether slave or freeborn, in anger. Admonition he used to call “modulation.” He practiced divination both by omens drawn from chance utterances and the flight of birds, never by burnt offerings, except frankincense. His sacrificial offerings were inanimate, though some say that he offered only cocks, suckling goats, and the suckling pigs they call porkers, but never lambs. Yet Aristoxenus maintains that he permitted the eating of all other animals, and abstained only from plowing oxen and rams. The same author declares, as was mentioned earlier,43 that Pythagoras acquired his doctrines from Themistoclea, the priestess of Delphi.

  Hieronymus says that when Pythagoras descended to Hades he saw the soul of Hesiod bound to a bronze pillar and uttering inarticulate cries, and that of Homer hanging from a tree and surrounded by serpents, these being their punishments for what they had said about the gods;44 he also saw men undergoing punishment for having refused to have intercourse with their wives. This, according to Aristoxenus, is why Pythagoras was honored by the people of Croton. Aristippus of Cyrene, in his work On the Natural Philosophers, says that the man was named Pythagoras because he spoke the truth no less reliably than the Pythian oracle.45

  22 He is said to have advised his disciples always to say, upon entering their homes,

  Where did I trespass? What did I accomplish? What did I not

       [do that I should have done?46

  23,24 He forbade them to bring sacrificial victims to the gods, and permitted them to worship only at an altar unstained by blood. He told them not to swear by the gods, since a man should rather strive to make himself worthy of trust. He enjoined them to honor their elders, on the principle that precedence in time gives a greater title to respect; for just as, in the world, sunrise precedes sunset, so in our existence the beginning precedes the end, and in life, birth precedes death. He said that one should honor gods before demigods;47 heroes before men; and first among men their parents; and they should associate with one another not so as to make enemies of their friends but to make friends of their enemies. He taught them to regard nothing as their own; to safeguard the law and to make war on lawlessness; and not to destroy or injure plant life or any animal that does men no harm. He held that shame and discretion forbid indulgence in laughter or scowling. He said that one ought to avoid excessive meat eating; on a journey, to alternate between exertion and relaxation; to train the memory; to say or do nothing in anger; to respect all divination; to sing to the lyre; and by hymns to show proper gratitude to gods and to good men. He prescribed abstention from beans, since by reason of their windy nature48 they partake most of the breath of life; and besides, by abstaining from them we leave our stomach in better order, and this will also make our dreams sweeter and less troubled.

  Minor Third Series: Nods to Pythagoras, 2.1.12, by Mark A. Reynolds, 2012. Graphite, ink, and pastels on mustard-stained paper, 56.5 × 55.2 cm.

  25 Alexander, in his Successions of Philosophers, says that he found the following precepts in a Pythagorean Memoir.49 The first principle of all things is the monad;50 arising from the monad, the indeterminate dyad serves as the substrate of the monad, which is cause. From the monad and the indeterminate dyad arise numbers; from numbers, points; from points, lines; from lines, plane figures; from plane figures, solid figures; from solid figures, perceptible bodies, of which there are four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. These elements interact and change completely into one another, and from them arises a universe animate, intelligent, and spherical, with the earth (which is also spherical and widely inhabited) at its center. There are also people at the antipodes, and our “down” is their “up.”

  26,27 Light and dark are equally apportioned in the universe, as are hot and cold, dry and moist; and of these, when hot predominates, it is summer; when cold, winter; when dry, spring; and when wet, autumn. If all are in equilibrium, we enjoy the finest periods of the year. The flourishing spring is the healthy season, the decaying autumn the unhealthy. This holds true also for the day; its flourishing belongs to the morning, its decay to the evening, which is therefore more unhealthy. The air that surrounds the earth is stagnant and unhealthy, and everything in it is mortal; but the uppermost air is in perpetual motion and pure and healthy, and everything in it is immortal and therefore divine. The sun, the moon, and the other stars are gods; for heat predominates in them, and heat is the cause of life. The moon is illuminated by the sun. There is a kinship between gods and men because man partakes of heat. Hence god takes thought for us. Fate is the cause of the order of the universe, of its totality and of its parts.

  28,29 A ray of the sun penetrates through the aether, whether the cold or the dense. (The air they call “cold aether,” the sea and moisture “dense aether.”) This ray plunges even to the depths and thereby engenders all living creatures. Everything that partakes of heat is alive, which is why plants are living things. But all living things do not have soul. The soul is a detached portion of the aether, partly the hot and partly the cold; and because it participates also in the cold aether the soul is distinct from life. It is immortal, since that from which it has been detached is immortal. Living creatures are begotten from one another through seeds; spontaneous generation from earth, however, is impossible. The seed is a droplet of brain that contains a hot vapor. When this droplet is brought to the womb, it emits, from the brain, serum, fluid, and blood, from which flesh, sinews, bones, hair, and the entire body are constituted, whereas it is from the vapor that soul and sense perception are constituted. First, solidifying in forty days, it takes shape; then, in seven or nine or at most ten months (in accordance with the ratios of harmony), the fully developed baby is brought forth. It has in it all the faculties of life, and these, which are interconnected, hold it together according to the ratios of harmony, each emerging at the prescribed stage.

  Variations of the Pythagorean theorem, recto and verso, folio 25 from a manuscript of Tahrir Uqlidis by Nasir al-Din Tusi, Ottoman period, 1710.

  Sense perception in general (and sight, in particular) is an extremely hot vapor. And that is why it is said to be possible to see through air and through water. For the hot is strongly resisted by the cold; so if the vapor in the eyes had been cold, it would have been dissipated on meeting the air, which resembles it. As it is, there are maxims in which he calls the eyes “the portals of the sun.” He concludes the same about hearing and the other senses.

  30 The soul of man, he says, is divided into three parts: mind, reason, and passion. Now mind and passion are present in the other animals as well, but man alone possesses reason. The soul’s headquarters extends
from the heart to the brain; the part of it that resides in the heart is passion, while reason and mind are located in the brain. Sensations are distillations from these. The reasoning part is immortal, the others are mortal. The soul draws its nourishment from the blood, and the ratios of the soul are breaths. The soul and its faculties are invisible, just as the aether is invisible.

  31,32 The veins and arteries and sinews are the bonds of the soul. But when the soul gains strength and settles down into itself, its ratios and deeds become its bonds. When cast out upon the earth, it wanders in the air like the body. Hermes is the steward of souls, and that is why he is called Hermes the Escorter, Hermes of the Gate, and Hermes of the Netherworld, since he leads the souls from their bodies both by land and by sea; the pure souls are led to the loftiest region, while the impure are not allowed to approach the pure or one another, but are bound by the Furies51 in unbreakable bonds. The air in its entirety is full of souls, and these are called demigods and heroes. It is they who send men dreams and omens of disease and health; and not only to men, but also to cattle and other domestic animals. And it is to them that purifications, expiations, all divination, omens, and the like are referred.

  33 The most significant thing in human life, he says, is the power to persuade the soul toward good or toward evil. Men who acquire a good soul are blessed; otherwise they are never at rest, nor can they keep to the same course. Justice has the force of an oath, and that is why Zeus is called the God of Oaths. Virtue is harmony and health and goodness in its entirety and god itself. Hence the universe is said to be constituted in accordance with the laws of harmony. Friendship is a harmonious equality. We should not pay equal honor to gods and heroes, but to the gods always, observing due reverence, wearing white robes, and after purification; to the heroes only after midday. Purity is attained by cleansing, ablution, and sprinkling with lustral water, and by avoiding all contact with cadavers, women in childbirth, and all that defiles, and by abstaining from the meat and flesh of animals that have died of disease, and from gurnards, blacktail, eggs and animals hatched from eggs, beans, and all the other items proscribed by those who perform mystic rites in the temples.

  34 Aristotle, in his work On the Pythagoreans, says that Pythagoras prescribed abstention from beans either because they resemble testicles, or because they resemble the gates of Hades, since it is the only plant that lacks joints;52 or because they harm one’s health, or because they resemble the shape of the world, or because they are associated with oligarchy, since beans are used in elections by lot. He forbade his disciples to pick up fallen crumbs, either in order to accustom them not to eat immoderately or because crumbs are associated with a person’s death. Moreover, Aristophanes declares that crumbs belong to the heroes; for in Heroes he says,

  Pythagoras, by Günter Haese, 1997. Phosphorbronze, 16 × 22 cm.

  Eat not what falls from the table!

  35 He forbade them to eat a white cock, because the bird is sacred to the Month53 and is a suppliant, supplication being a good thing; and it is sacred to the Month because it announces the time of day. Furthermore, white has the nature of good, black that of evil. He forbade them to touch any species of fish that is sacred, since it is not right for gods and men to be allotted the same things, any more than free men and slaves. He forbade them to break their bread into pieces, since in times past friends met over a single loaf, as the barbarians do to this day; and we should not divide what brings them together. Some, however, connect this prohibition to the judgment of the dead in Hades, others to the idea that the practice makes one cowardly in war, and still others to the idea that it is from this that the world begins.54

  He held that the most beautiful of the solids is the sphere, the most beautiful of the plane figures the circle. Old age and everything that is decreasing are similar, while youth and increase are one and the same. Health is the conservation of the form, disease its destruction. He said of salt that it should be brought to the table as a reminder of what is right; for salt preserves everything it finds, and it has arisen from the purest sources, the sun and sea.

  36 Alexander says he found these precepts in a Pythagorean Memoir. What followed it was found in Aristotle.

  But Pythagoras’s dignified air is not overlooked even by Timon, though the satirist jabs at him in his Lampoons when he says,

  Pythagoras, inclined to wonder-working doctrines,

  A snarer of men, a familiar friend of Bombast.

  Xenophanes bears witness to Pythagoras’s having been different persons at different times in the elegy that begins,

  Now, in turn, I’ll take up another view and show you the way.

  And he speaks of him as follows:

  One day, passing a puppy being thrashed,

   They say he pitied the whelp and cried out,

  “Stop, don’t strike! For it’s the soul of a dear man—

   I recognized him by his yelp.”

  37 Thus Xenophanes. Cratinus also lampooned him in The Woman Who Followed Pythagoras; and in The Tarantines he says,

  It is their custom, when any outsider approaches them,

  To test the strength of their doctrines,

  To upset and confound him with antitheses, limits,

  Neatly balanced clauses, fallacies, and magnitudes.

  And Mnesimachus in the Alcmeon:

  In the manner of Pythagoras we sacrifice to Loxias,55

  Eating nothing whatsoever that lives and breathes.

  38 Aristophon in Pythagoras’s Disciple:

  A: He said that he descended to Hades and observed its inhabitants,

  How each of them lived, and how different from the lives of the dead

  Were the lives of the Pythagoreans; for they alone,

  On account of their piety, were permitted to dine

  With Pluto.56 B: You speak of a heedless god,

  If he enjoys consorting with such trash.

  And later on, in the same work:

       They eat

  Vegetables, and with these they drink water.

  Unwashed, lice-ridden, clothed in tattered cloaks—

  No one nowadays could stand them.

  39 This is how Pythagoras died. Sitting among his acquaintances at the house of Milo,57 it happened that the house was set on fire, out of envy, by one of the people who had not been judged worthy of being admitted to his presence. Some, however, say that it was the work of the people of Croton, who were taking precautions against the imposition of a tyranny. Pythagoras was caught attempting to flee; and when he reached a certain beanfield, he stopped and said he would rather be captured than cross it, and would rather be killed than converse; and so his pursuers cut his throat. The majority of his companions, around forty, were also slaughtered. Only a few escaped, including Archippus of Tarentum58 and Lysis, who was mentioned earlier.59

  40 Dicaearchus says that Pythagoras died a fugitive in the temple of the Muses at Metapontum after fasting for forty days. Heraclides, in his Epitome of the Lives of Satyrus, says that after burying Pherecydes in Delos Pythagoras returned to Italy,60 and when he found Cylon of Croton61 giving a lavish banquet he withdrew to Metapontum and there ended his life by abstaining from food, as he had no wish to live longer. But Hermippus says that when the citizens of Agrigentum and Syracuse62 were at war, Pythagoras went out with his friends and fought in the front ranks for the Agrigentines. When they were put to flight, he was killed by the Syracusans as he was trying to avoid the beanfield. The rest, around thirty-five men, were burned alive in Tarentum63 for seeking to oppose those in power.

  41 Hermippus recounts another tale about Pythagoras. When he arrived in Italy, he built an underground chamber and instructed his mother to commit to writing everything that occurred, and at what time, and then to send her notes down to him until he came back up. This his mother did. And after a time Pythagoras emerged, withered and skeletal; entering the assembly, he said that he had come from Hades; he even read aloud what he had experienced there. Shaken
by what he said, the people wept and wailed and were so convinced Pythagoras was a god that they sent their wives to him in the hope they might learn some of his doctrines. These were called the Pythagorizusae (Women Who Followed Pythagoras). So says Hermippus.

  Pythagoras Emerging from the Underworld, by Salvator Rosa, 1662.

  42 Pythagoras had a wife, Theano by name, the daughter of Brontinus of Croton,64 though some say that Theano was Brontinus’ wife and Pythagoras’s student. He also had a daughter, Damo, as Lysis says in a letter to Hippasus, where he writes about Pythagoras as follows: “I am told by many that you discourse on philosophy in public, a thing that Pythagoras regarded as unworthy. At any rate, he entrusted his memoirs to his daughter, Damo, and commanded her never to give them to anyone outside their house. And though she could have sold them for a large sum she would not do so, since she considered poverty and her father’s commandments more valuable than gold. This from a woman!”

  43 Pythagoras and Theano also had a son, Telauges, who succeeded his father and was Empedocles’65 instructor, according to some. Hippobotus, at any rate, says that Empedocles mentions

  Telauges, renowned son of Theano and Pythagoras.

  No written work of Telauges is known, though there are a number of works by his mother, Theano. There is even a story that when asked on which day a woman is pure after intercourse, she replied, “With her husband immediately, with anyone else never.” And she advised a woman who was going in to her husband to put aside her modesty at the same time as her clothes, and when rising, to don them both again. When asked, “What clothes?” she replied, “Those that cause me to be called a woman.”