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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Pythagoras Biography PYTHAGORAS. A famous Greek philosopher and geometer, born at Samos, probably in the forty-ninth Olympiad (584581 b.c.). He was the son of Mnesarchus and is said to have been the pupil of Pherecydes. He had become known in Ionia as a man of great learning when, perhaps driven from home by disgust at the tyranny of Polycrates about 530 b.c., he migrated to Magna Gręcia and settled at Crotona. Here he founded an exclusive brotherhood among the aristocracy of the place. The fame of it spread abroad and attracted into its circle men and women not only from other neighboring colonies, but from all parts of south Italy. The original purpose of this brotherhood was probably religious and not political, and yet the society became involved in the fierce struggles between the aristocracy and the democracy that were at this time raging in lower Italy; and when the popular party gained the upper hand, in its wild fury it turned upon the Pythagorean brothers and burned them in their meeting places. Only a few escaped. It is not certain whether Pythagoras himself perished in this outbreak or whether he had previously died peacefully in Metapontum, whither he is said to have retired when the storm was gathering. He is said to have traveled from Persia to Gaul in search of wisdom, to have become initiated in Egypt into the venerable mysteries of that country, and there to have acquired mathematical lore and a belief in the transmigration of souls. He is even reported to have been the son of Hermes in a previous metempsychosis and to have been permitted to bring with him into his earthly life the memory of all his past experiences, and he is credited with all sorts of miraculous performances. The exact character of his own personal teachings is a matter of dispute. His name is mentioned only three times in the whole Aristotelian corpus; both Plato and Aristotle speak frequently of Pythagoreans; they evidently knew nothing definite of the views actually promulgated by Pythagoras himself. The main reason for this ignorance is to be found in the fact that Pythagoras committed nothing to writing, and every disciple strove to gain credit for his own phase of Pythagoreanism by attributing it to the venerated master, whose ipse dixit carried so much weight. It seems reasonable, in the light of all we know, to suppose that the early Pythagorean brotherhood was one of the mystic circles, numerous at that time, founded with a view of purifying its members from some imaginary guilt and accomplishing this end by the observance of taboo. Among the akousmata, or exoteric teachings of the later Pythagoreans, we find such prohibitions as these: not to sit on a quart measure; not to step across the beam of a balance; not to eat beans or the heart of animals; not to stir fire with iron; not to look in a mirror beside a light. All these punctilios point almost unmistakably to primitive magic. As Burnet remarks, we find in such practices, so senseless to the outsider, an explanation of the popular outburst against the society. The domination of such a religious order ruling the state must have been galling enough. "Greek democracies could never pardon the introduction of new gods. . . . This introduced, as it were, an unknown and incalculable element into the arrangements of the state, which might very likely be hostile to the democracy, and was in any case a standing menace to the mass of citizens, who had no means of propitiating the intruding divinity." But although the main motive of the brotherhood was thus superstitious, there is no doubt that a certain philosophic doctrine was taught to the brethren by its learned founder. Like all the early Greek philosophies, it was probably cosmological, and it was likewise dualistic. "The two primary opposites, the Limited and the Unlimited, were brought together in a 'harmony' which could be numerically determined." (Burnet.) The Unlimited was space, the Limited was the definite forms in which space manifested itself. Space was not regarded as an abstract entity; it was rather a material sensible thing, probably identified with air. Hence the universe was said to breathe. The unlimited air is in its essence dark; the principle of limitation is fire, the bright element which reveals definite spatial outlines. How much mathematics Pythagoras knew is likewise uncertain. To him with little question is to be ascribed the first proof of the theorem known to the Egyptian "rope stretchers" concerning the right-angled triangle (see Hypotenuse), which they knew in the case of the triangle with sides 3, 4, 5, without giving a rigorous proof. Of other matters, what is to be ascribed to Pythagoras himself and what to his pupils it is difficult to decide. Therefore we generally speak of a mathematical truth as being discovered by the Pythagoreans rather than by Pythagoras. See Pythagoreanism. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 408-409. |