The Learning and Piety of Pythagoras
While still young, so eager was he for knowledge, Pythagoras left his own country and had himself initiated into all the mysteries and rites not only of Greece but also of foreign countries. He learned the Egyptian language, and also journeyed among the Chaldaeans and Magi. While in Crete he went down into the cave of Ida with Epimenides; he also entered the Egyptian sanctuaries, and learned their secret lore concerning the gods. After that he sailed away to Croton in Italy, and there laid down a constitution for the Italian Greeks.
Pythagoras spent most of his time upon the arithmetical aspect of geometry; he discovered the musical intervals on the monochord. Nor did he neglect even medicine. He offered a sacrifice of oxen on finding that in a right-angled triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the squares on the sides containing the right angle. This becomes known as the Pythagorean Theorem.
Pythagorean Cosmology
The principle of all things is the monad or unit; arising from this monad the undefined dyad or two serves as material substratum to the monad, which is cause. From the monad and the undefined dyad spring numbers; from numbers, points, lines and plane figures; from plane figures, solid figures; from solid figures, sensible bodies, the elements of which are four, fire, water, earth and air. These elements interchange and turn into one another completely, and combine to produce a universe animate, intelligent, spherical, with the earth at its centre, the earth itself too being spherical and inhabited round about. There are also antipodes, and our “down” is their “up.” Light and darkness have equal part in the universe, so have hot and cold, and dry and moist;
The sun, the moon, and the other stars are gods; for, in them, there is a preponderance of heat, and heat is the cause of life. Gods and men are akin, inasmuch as man partakes of heat; therefore God takes thought for man. Fate is the cause of the order of things both as a whole and separately.
Pythagorean Psychology
Soul is distinct from life; it is immortal, since [aether], from which it is detached, is immortal. Living creatures are reproduced from one another by germination; there is no such thing as spontaneous generation from earth. The germ is a clot of brain containing hot vapour within it; and this, when brought to the womb, throws out ichor, fluid and blood, whence are formed flesh, sinews, bones, hairs, and the whole of the body, while soul and sense come from the vapour within. First congealing in about forty days, it receives form and, according to the ratios of “harmony”, brings forth the mature child. It has in it all the relations constituting life, and these, forming a continuous series, keep it together according to the ratios of harmony, each appearing at regulated intervals.
Hermes is the steward of souls, since it is he who brings in the souls from their bodies both by land and sea; and the pure are taken into the uppermost region, but the impure are not permitted to approach the pure or each other, but are bound by the Furies in bonds unbreakable. The whole air is full of souls which are called genii or heroes; these are they who send men dreams and signs of future disease and health, and not to men alone, but to sheep also and cattle as well; and it is to them that purifications and lustrations, all divination, omens and the like, have reference.
References:
- Laertius, Diogenes. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Trans. R. D. Hicks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.
- Laertius, Diogenes. “Lives of the Eminent Philosophers”. Perseus Digital Library. Accessed March 17, 2018. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0258 ; ebooks @ Adelaide. March 14, 2014. Accessed March 17, 2018. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/diogenes_laertius
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