Vitae philosophorum

Some say it was a certain trainer named Pythagoras who instituted this diet,[*](Cf. Iamblichus, Vit. Pyth. 25, and Porphyry, De abstinentia, i. 26.) and not our Pythagoras, who forbade even the killing, let alone the eating, of animals which share with us the privilege of having a soul. This was the excuse put forward; but his real reason for forbidding animal diet was to practise people and accustom them to simplicity of life, so that they could live on things easily procurable, spreading their tables with uncooked foods and drinking pure water only, for this was the way to a healthy body and a keen mind. Of course the only altar at which he worshipped was that of Apollo the Giver of Life, behind the Altar of Horns at Delos, for thereon were placed flour and meal and cakes, without the use of fire, and there was no animal victim, as we are told by Aristotle in his Constitution of Delos.

He was the first, they say, to declare that the soul, bound now in this creature, now in that, thus goes on a round ordained of necessity. He too, according to Aristoxenus the musician, was the first to introduce weights and measures into Greece. It was he who first declared that the Evening and Morning Stars are the same, as Parmenides maintains.[*](Cf. inf. ix. 23.) So greatly was he admired that his disciples used to be called prophets to declare the voice of God, besides which he himself says in a written work that after two hundred and seven years in Hades he has returned to the land of the living. Thus it was that they remained his staunch adherents,

Down to the time of Philolaus it was not possible to acquire knowledge of any Pythagorean doctrine, and Philolaus alone brought out those three celebrated books which Plato sent a hundred minas to purchase. Not less than six hundred persons went to his evening lectures; and those who were privileged to see him wrote to their friends congratulating themselves on a great piece of good fortune. Moreover, the Metapontines named his house the Temple of Demeter and his porch the Museum, so we learn from Favorinus in his Miscellaneous History.[*](See, however, Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. 4, who cites as his authority Timaeus the Sicilian historian (F.H.G. i. p. 211, Fr. 78), who was not improbably the source used by Favorinus.) And the rest of the Pythagoreans used to say that not all his doctrines were for all men to hear, our authority for this being Aristoxenus in the tenth book of his Rules of Pedagogy,

where we are also told that one of the school, Xenophilus by name, asked by some one how he could best educate his son, replied, By making him the citizen of a well-governed state. Throughout Italy Pythagoras made many into good men and true, men too of note like the lawgivers Zaleucus and Charondas; for he had a great gift for friendship, and especially, when he found his own watchwords adopted by anyone, he would immediately take to that man and make a friend of him.

The following were his watchwords or precepts: don’t stir the fire with a knife, don’t step over the beam of a balance, don’t sit down on your bushel,[*](The χοῖνιξ was about a quart, in dry measure.) don’t eat your heart, don’t help a man off with a load but help him on, always roll your bed-clothes up, don’t put God’s image on the circle of a ring, don’t leave the pan’s imprint on the ashes, don’t wipe up