The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius (best free ebook reader txt) 📕

Behave not shamelessly to anyone.

And Sosicrates, in his Successions, relates that he, having being asked by Leon, the tyrant of the Phliasians, who he was, replied: “A philosopher.” And adds that he used to compare life to a festival. “And as some people came to a festival to contend for the prizes, and others for the purposes of traffic, and the best as spectators; so also in life, the men of slavish dispositions,” said he, “are born hunters after glory and covetousness, but philosophers are seekers after truth.” And thus he spoke on this subject. But in the three treatises above mentioned, the following principles are laid down by Pythagoras generally:

He forbids men to pray for anything in particular for themselves, because they do not know what is good for them. He calls drunkenness an expression identical with ruin, and rejects all superfluity, saying: “That no one ought to exceed the proper quantity of meat and drink.” And on the subject of venereal pleasures, he speaks thus: “One ought to sacrifice to Venus in the winter, not in the summer; and in autumn and spring in a lesser degree. But the practice is pernicious at every season, and is never good for the health.” And once, when he was asked when a man might indulge in the pleasures of love, he replied: “Whenever you wish to be weaker than yourself.”

And he divides the life of man thus: A boy for twenty years, a young man (νεάνισκος) for twenty years, a middle-aged man (νεανίας) for twenty years, an old man for twenty years. And these different ages correspond proportionably to the seasons: boyhood answers to spring, youth to summer, middle age to autumn, and old age to winter. And he uses νεάνισκος here as equivalent to μειράκιον, and νεανίας as equivalent to ἀνὴρ.

He was the first person, as Timaeus says, who asserted that the property of friends is common, and that friendship is equality. And his disciples used to put all their possessions together into one store, and use them in common; and for five years they kept silence, doing nothing but listen to discourses, and never once seeing Pythagoras, until they were approved; after that time they were admitted into his house, and allowed to see him. They also abstained from the use of cypress coffins, because the sceptre of Jupiter was made of that wood, as Hermippus tells us in the second book of his account of Pythagoras.

He is said to have been a man of the most dignified appearance, and his disciples adopted an opinion respecting him that he was Apollo who had come from the Hyperboreans; and it is said that once when he was stripped naked, he was seen to have a golden thigh. And there were many people who affirmed that when he was crossing the river Nessus it addressed him by his name.

Timaeus, in the tenth book of his Histories, tells us that he used to say that women who were married to men had the names of the Gods, being successively called virgins, then nymphs, and subsequently mothers.

It was Pythagoras also who carried geometry to perfection, after Moeris had first found out the principles of the elements of that science, as Aristiclides tells us in the second book of his History of Alexander; and the part of the science to which Pythagoras applied himself above all others was arithmetic. He also discovered the numerical relation of sounds on a single string; he also studied medicine. And Apollodorus, the logician, records of him that he sacrificed a hecatomb when he had discovered that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the squares of the sides containing the right angle. And there is an epigram which is couched in the following terms:

When the great Samian sage his noble problem found,
A hundred oxen dyed with their lifeblood the ground.

He is also said to have been the first man who trained athletes on meat; and Eurymenes was the first man, according to the statement of Phavorinus in the third book of his Commentaries, who ever did submit to this diet, as before that time men used to train themselves on dry figs and moist cheese, and wheaten bread; as the same Phavorinus informs us in the eighth book of his Universal History. But some authors state that a trainer of the name of Pythagoras certainly did train his athletes on this system, but that it was not our philosopher; for that he even forbade men to kill animals at all, much less would have allowed his disciples to eat them, as having a right to live in common with mankind. And this was his pretext; but in reality he prohibited the eating of animals because he wished to train and accustom men to simplicity of life, so that all their food should be easily procurable, as it would be if they ate only such things as required no fire to dress them, and if they drank plain water; for from this diet they would derive health of body and acuteness of intellect.

The only altar at which he worshipped was that of Apollo the Father at Delos, which is at the back of the altar of Ceratinus, because wheat and barley and cheesecakes are the only offerings laid upon it, being not dressed by fire; and no victim is ever slain there, as Aristotle tells us in his Constitution of the Delians. They say, too, that he was the first person who asserted that the soul went a necessary circle being changed about and confined at different times in different bodies.

He was also the first person who introduced measures and weights among the Greeks; as Aristoxenus the musician informs us.

Parmenides, too, assures us that he was the first person who asserted the identity of Hesperus and