Vitae philosophorum

And Aristophon in the Pythagorist[*](Meineke, C.G.F. iii. 362.):

A. He told how he travelled in Hades and looked on the dwellers below,
1. How each of them lives, but how different by far from the lives of the dead
2. Were the lives of the Pythagoreans, for these alone, so he said,
   V2_355
3. Were suffered to dine with King Pluto, which was for their piety’s sake.
4. B. What an ill-tempered god for whom such swine, such creatures good company make;

1. Their food is just greens, and to wet it pure water is all that they drink;
2. And the want of a bath, and the vermin, and their old threadbare coats so do stink
3. That none of the rest will come near them.

Pythagoras met his death in this wise.[*](In the account which follows two passages should be distinguished: (1) συνεδρεύοντος συνέβη, and (2) οὔτω δὲ καὶ(§ 40) ἀσιτήσαντα. A similar combination of Neanthes and Dicaearchus is found in Porphyry, Vit. Pyth 55 sqq., Neanthes apparently insisting on the absence, and Dicaearchus on the presence, of the master at the time when the brotherhood were attacked and scattered. Iamblichus, Vit. Pyth. 251 sq., cites Nicomachus, whose version agrees with that of Neanthes.) As he sat one day among his acquaintances at the house of Milo, it chanced that the house was set ablaze out of jealousy by one of the people who were not accounted worthy of admittance to his presence, though some say it was the work of the inhabitants of Croton anxious to safeguard themselves against the setting-up of a tyranny. Pythagoras was caught as he tried to escape; he got as far as a certain field of beans, where he stopped, saying he would be captured rather than cross it, and be killed rather than prate about his doctrines; and so his pursuers cut his throat.[*](This passage, partly in direct (γενόμενος, ἔστη, εἰπών) and partly in reported speech (καταληφθῆναι. ἀποσφαγῆναι), receives some light from the story of Myllias and his wife Timycha as given by Iamblichus, Vit. Pyth. 189-194, on the authority of Hippobotus and Neanthes (cf. also Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. § 61, where the story of Damon and Phintias is said to have been transferred by Hippobotus and Neanthes to the same trusty pair, Myllias and Timycha). The story in Iamblichus represents a band of Pythagoreans pursued by a tyrant’s myrmidons and caught in a plain where beans were growing, all of them preferring to die where they stood rather than trample on the beans; but this story might be located anywhere. It has nothing inherently to do with the end of Pythagoras. What remains, τὸν δὲ Π. καταληφθῆναι διεξιόντα, may be compared with Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. § 57, where we are told that the disciples made a bridge of their own bodies over the fire and thus the master escaped from the burning house but, in despair at the extinction of his school, chose a voluntary dealth. The words οὕτω δέ which follow come in awkwardly, as they are separated from the sentence about the fire.) So also were murdered

Dicaearchus, however, says that Pythagoras died a fugitive in the temple of the Muses at Metapontum after forty days’ starvation. Heraclides, in his Epitome of the Lives of Satyrus, says that, after burying Pherecydes at Delos, he returned to Italy and, when he found Cylon of Croton giving a luxurious banquet to all and sundry, retired to Metapontum to end his days there by starvation, having no wish to live longer. On the other hand, Hermippus relates that, when the men of Agrigentum and Syracuse were at war, Pythagoras and his disciples went out and fought in the van of the army of the Agrigentines, and, their line being turned, he was killed by the Syracusans as he was trying to avoid the beanfield; the rest, about thirty-five in number, were burned at the stake in Tarentum for trying to set up a government in opposition to those in power.

Hermippus gives another anecdote. Pythagoras, on coming to Italy, made a subterranean dwelling and enjoined on his mother to mark and record all that passed, and at what hour, and to send her notes down to him until he should ascend. She did so. Pythagoras some time afterwards came up withered and looking like a skeleton, then went into the assembly and declared he had been down to Hades, and even read out his experiences to them. They were so affected that they wept and wailed and looked upon him as divine, going so far as to send

Pythagoras had a wife, Theano by name, daughter of Brontinus of Croton, though some call her Brontinus’s wife and Pythagoras’s pupil. He had a daughter Damo, according to the letter of Lysis to Hippasus, which says of him, I am told by many that you discourse publicly, a thing which Pythagoras deemed unworthy, for certain it is that, when he entrusted his daughter Damo with the custody of his memoirs, he solemnly charged her never to give them to anyone outside his house. And, although she could have sold the writings for a large sum of money, she would not, but reckoned poverty and her father’s solemn injunctions more precious than gold, for all that she was a woman.