Vitae philosophorum

Now he was in Egypt when Polycrates sent him a letter of introduction to Amasis; he learnt the Egyptian language, so we learn from Antiphon in his book On Men of Outstanding Merit, and he also journeyed among the Chaldaeans and Magi. Then while in Crete he went down into the cave of Ida with Epimenides; he also entered the Egyptian sanctuaries,[*](Compare Clement Alex. Strom. i. 66 Θαλῆς . . . τοῖς Αἱγυπτίων προφήταις συμβεβληκέναι εἴρηται, καθάπερ καὶ ὁ Πυθαγόρας αὐτοῖς γε τούτοις διʼ οὓς καὶ περιετέμνετο, ἵνα δὴ καὶ εἰς τὰ ἄδυτα κατελθὼν τὴν μνστικὴν παρὰ Αλγυπτίων ἐκμάθοι φιλοσοφίαν. Cf. also Iamblichus, Vit. Pyth. 18 sq.) and was told their secret lore concerning the gods. After that he returned to Samos to find his country under the tyranny of Polycrates; so he sailed away to Croton in Italy, and there he laid down a constitution for the Italian Greeks, and he and his followers were held in great estimation; for, being nearly three hundred in number, so well did they govern the state that its constitution was in effect a true aristocracy (government by the best).

This is what Heraclides of Pontus tells us he used to say about himself: that he had once been Aethalides and was accounted to be Hermes’ son, and Hermes told him he might choose any gift he liked except immortality; so he asked to retain through life and through death a memory of his experiences. Hence in life he could recall everything, and when he died he still kept the

When Euphorbus died, his soul passed into Hermotimus, and he also, wishing to authenticate the story, went up to the temple of Apollo at Branchidae, where he identified the shield which Menelaus, on his voyage home from Troy, had dedicated to Apollo, so he said: the shield being now so rotten through and through that the ivory facing only was left. When Hermotimus died, he became Pyrrhus, a fisherman of Delos, and again he remembered everything, how he was first Aethalides, then Euphorbus, then Hermotimus, and then Pyrrhus. But when Pyrrhus died, he became Pythagoras, and still remembered all the facts mentioned.

There are some who insist, absurdly enough, that Pythagoras left no writings whatever. At all events Heraclitus, the physicist,[*](Fr. 129 D., 17 B.) almost shouts in our ear, Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, practised inquiry beyond all other men, and in this selection of his writings made himself a wisdom of his own, showing much learning but poor workmanship. The occasion of this remark was the opening words of Pythagoras’s treatise On Nature, namely, Nay, I swear by the air I breathe, I swear by the water I drink, I will never suffer censure on account of this

But the book which passes as the work of Pythagoras is by Lysis of Tarentum, a Pythagorean, who fled to Thebes and taught Epaminondas.[*](§§ 6-7 ἔνιοι μὲν καθηγησαμένου. Hesychius in Suidas (s.v.), an authority older than Schol. Plat. 600 B, proves that this passage is a coherent whole. The fragment of Heraclitus (B 129 Diels, 17 Byw.) is certainly genuine. There may be, in ἱστορίην, an allusion to the study of mensuration in Egypt. The pretended explanation, he spoke thus because . . . introduces an extract from a work which, like all those attributed to Pythagoras, must have been a late forgery.) Heraclides, the son of Serapion, in his Epitome of Sotion, says that he also wrote a poem On the Universe, and secondly the Sacred Poem which begins:

Young men, come reverence in quietude
1. All these my words;