Vitae philosophorum

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.

They also had a son Telauges, who succeeded his father and, according to some, was Empedocles’ instructor. At all events Hippobotus makes Empedocles say[*](Fr. 155 D.):

1. Telauges, famed
2. Son of Theano and Pythagoras.

To return to Pythagoras. According to Heraclides, the son of Serapion, he was eighty years old when he died, and this agrees with his own description of the life of man, though most authorities say he was ninety. And there are jesting lines of my own upon him as follows[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 121.):

Not thou alone from all things animate
1. Didst keep, Pythagoras. All food is dead
2. When boil’d and bak’d and salt-besprinkle-èd;
3. For then it surely is inanimate.

So wise was wise Pythagoras that he
1. Would touch no meats, but called it impious,
2. Bade others eat. Good wisdom: not for us
3. To do the wrong; let others impious be.

And again[*](Anth. Plan. v. 35.):

If thou wouldst know the mind of old Pythagoras,
1. Look on Euphorbus’ buckler and its boss.
2. He says I’ve lived before. If, when he says he was,
3. He was not, he was no-one when he was.

Woe! Woe! Whence, Pythagoras, this deep reverence for beans? Why did he fall in the midst of his disciples? A bean-field there was he durst not cross; sooner than trample on it, he endured to be slain at the cross-roads by the men of Acragas.

He flourished in the 60th Olympiad[*](540-536 b.c. Cf. Clem. Alex. Strom. i 65 in the 62nd Olympiad [532-528 b.c.], eight years later, and contemporary with Polycrates of Samos.) and his

For the last of the Pythagoreans, whom Aristoxenus in his time saw, were Xenophilus from the Thracian Chalcidice, Phanton of Phlius, and Echecrates, Diocles and Polymnastus, also of Phlius, who were pupils of Philolaus and Eurytus of Tarentum.

There were four men of the name of Pythagoras living about the same time and at no great distance from one another: (1) of Croton, a man with tyrannical leanings; (2) of Phlius, an athlete, some say a trainer; (3) of Zacynthus; (4) our subject, who discovered the secrets of philosophy [and taught them], and to whom was applied the phrase, The Master said (Ipse dixit), which passed into a proverb of ordinary life.

Some say there was also another Pythagoras, a sculptor of Rhegium, who is thought to have been the first to aim at rhythm and symmetry; another a sculptor of Samos; another a bad orator; another a doctor who wrote on hernia and also compiled some things about Homer; and yet another who, so we are told by Dionysius, wrote a history of the Dorian race. Eratosthenes says, according to what we learn from Favorinus in the eighth book of his Miscellaneous History, that the last-named was the first to box scientifically, in the 48th Olympiad,[*](588-584 b.c.) keeping his hair long and wearing a purple robe; and that when he was excluded with ridicule from the boys’ contest, he went at once to the men’s and won that;

this is declared by Theaetetus’s epigram[*](Anth. Plan. iii. 35.):

Know’st one Pythagoras, long-haired Pythagoras,
1. The far-fam’d boxer of the Samians?
2. I am Pythagoras; ask the Elians
3. What were my feats, thou’lt not believe the tale.

Favorinus says that our philosopher used definitions throughout the subject matter of mathematics; their use was extended by Socrates and his disciples, and afterwards by Aristotle and the Stoics.

Further, we are told that he was the first to call the heaven the universe and the earth spherical,[*](As Favorinus seems to have paid special attention to discoveries and the invention of names (cf. ii. 1, 20, viii. 12, 47, ix. 23, 34), it seems likely that he is our author’s authority here; so probably a different book of Favorinus is cited.) though Theophrastus says it was Parmenides, and Zeno that it was Hesiod.

It is said that Cylon was a rival of Pythagoras, as Antilochus[*](Apelt suggests Antiphon, comparing Xen. Mem. i. 6.) was of Socrates.

Pythagoras the athlete was also the subject of another epigram as follows[*](Anth. Plan. iii. 16.):

Gone to box with other lads
1. Is the lad Pythagoras,
2. Gone to the games Olympian
3. Crates’ son the Samian.

Pythagoras to Anaximenes.

Even you, O most excellent of men, were you no better born and famed than Pythagoras, would have risen and departed from Miletus. But now your ancestral glory has detained you as it had detained me were I Anaximenes’s peer. But if you, the best men, abandon your cities, then will their good order perish, and the peril from the Medes will increase.

For always to scan the heavens is not well, but more seemly is it to be provident for one’s

Having now finished our account of Pythagoras, we have next to speak of the noteworthy Pythagoreans; after them will come the philosophers whom some denominate sporadic [i.e. belonging to no particular school]; and then, in the next place, we will append the succession of all those worthy of notice as far as Epicurus, in the way that we promised. We have already treated of Theano and Telauges: so now we have first to speak of Empedocles, for some say he was a pupil of Pythagoras.

Empedocles was, according to Hippobotus, the son of Meton and grandson of Empedocles, and was a native of Agrigentum. This is confirmed by Timaeus in the fifteenth book of his Histories, and he adds that Empedocles, the poet’s grandfather, had been a man of distinction. Hermippus also agrees with Timaeus. So, too, Heraclides, in his treatise On Diseases,[*](v. 67.) says that he was of an illustrious family, his grandfather having kept racehorses. Eratosthenes also in his Olympic Victories records, on the authority of Aristotle, that the father of Meton was a victor in the 71st Olympiad.[*](496 b.c.)

The grammarian Apollodorus in his Chronology tells us that

He was the son of Meton, and Glaucus says he went to Thurii, just then founded.[*](445-444 b.c.)

Those who relate that, being exiled from his home, he went to Syracuse and fought in their ranks against the Athenians seem, in my judgement at least, to be completely mistaken. For by that time either he was no longer living or in extreme old age, which is inconsistent with the story.

This man’s namesake and grandfather,

But Satyrus in his Lives states that Empedocles was the son of Exaenetus and himself left a son named Exaenetus, and that in the same Olympiad Empedocles himself was victorious in the horse-race and his son in wrestling, or, as Heraclides[*](i.e. Heraclides Lembus.) in his Epitome has it, in the foot-race. I found[*](Cf. Introd. p. xiv.) in the Memorabilia of Favorinus a statement that Empedocles feasted the sacred envoys on a sacrificial ox made of honey and barley-meal, and that he had a brother named Callicratides. Telauges, the son of Pythagoras, in his letter to Philolaus calls Empedocles the son of Archinomus.

That he belonged to Agrigentum in Sicily he himself testifies at the beginning of his Purifications[*](Fr. 112 D.):

My friends, who dwell in the great city sloping down to yellow Acragas, hard by the citadel.

Timaeus in the ninth book of his Histories says he

And there lived among them a man of superhuman knowledge, who verily possessed the greatest wealth of wisdom.

Neanthes states that down to the time of Philolaus and Empedocles all Pythagoreans were admitted to the discussions. But when Empedocles himself made them public property by his poem, they made a law that they should not be imparted to any poet. He says the same thing also happened to Plato, for he too was excommunicated. But which of the Pythagoreans it was who had Empedocles for a pupil he did not say. For the epistle commonly attributed to Telauges and the statement that Empedocles was the pupil of both Hippasus and Brontinus he held to be unworthy of credence.

Theophrastus affirms that he was an admirer of Parmenides and imitated him in his verses, for Parmenides too had published his treatise On Nature in verse.

But Hermippus’s account is that he was an admirer not so much of Parmenides as of Xenophanes, with whom in fact he lived and whose writing of poetry he imitated, and that his meeting with the Pythagoreans was subsequent. Alcidamas tells us in his treatise on Physics that Zeno and Empedocles were pupils of Parmenides about the same time, that afterwards they left him, and that, while Zeno framed his own system, Empedocles became the pupil of Anaxagoras and Pythagoras,

Aristotle in his Sophist calls Empedocles the inventor of rhetoric as Zeno of dialectic. In his treatise On Poets he says that Empedocles was of Homer’s school and powerful in diction, being great in metaphors and in the use of all other poetical devices. He also says that he wrote other poems, in particular the invasion of Xerxes and a hymn to Apollo, which a sister of his (or, according to Hieronymus, his daughter) afterwards burnt. The hymn she destroyed unintentionally, but the poem on the Persian war deliberately, because it was unfinished.

And in general terms he says he wrote both tragedies and political discourses. But Heraclides, the son of Sarapion, attributes the tragedies to a different author. Hieronymus declares that he had come across forty-three of these plays, while Neanthes tells us that Empedocles wrote these tragedies in his youth, and that he, Neanthes, was acquainted with seven of them.

Satyrus in his Lives says that he was also a physician and an excellent orator: at all events Gorgias of Leontini, a man pre-eminent in oratory and the author of a treatise on the art, had been his pupil. Of Gorgias Apollodorus says in his Chronology that he lived to be one hundred and nine.

Satyrus quotes this same Gorgias as saying that he himself was present when Empedocles performed magical feats. Nay more: he contends that Empedocles in his poems lays claim to this power and to much besides when he says[*](Fr. 111 D.):

And thou shalt learn all the drugs that are a defence to ward off ills and old age, since for thee alone shall I accomplish all this. Thou shalt arrest the violence of the unwearied winds that arise and sweep the earth, laying waste the cornfields with their blasts; and again, if thou so will, thou shalt call back winds in requital. Thou shalt make after the dark rain a seasonable drought for men, and again after the summer drought thou shalt cause tree-nourishing streams to pour from the sky. Thou shalt bring back from Hades a dead man’s strength.

Timaeus also in the eighteenth [*](According to Beloch this should be the twelfth book; cf. inf. § 66.)book of his Histories remarks that Empedocles has been admired on many grounds. For instance, when the etesian winds once began to blow violently and to damage the crops, he ordered asses to be flayed and bags to be made of their skin. These he stretched out here and there on the hills and headlands to catch the wind and, because this checked the wind, he was called the wind-stayer. Heraclides in his book On Diseases[*](v. 67.) says that he furnished Pausanias with the facts about the woman in a trance. This Pausanias, according to Aristippus and Satyrus, was his bosom-friend, to whom he dedicated his poem On Nature thus[*](Fr. 1 D.):