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1 results

  • Chapter 1 - Pythagoras

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 24-45

  • Summary

    The evidence for Pythagoras in Aristotle's lost work on the Pythagoreans is problematic, and what he has to say about him in the extant treatises amounts to very little. This chapter discusses the issues by going back some fifty years, to 1962, which happens to be the date of two highly influential books by supremely distinguished scholars. Plato has one important reference to Pythagoras, namely to the point that he taught his followers a way of life which later Pythagoreans continued to pursue. Pythagoras was certainly a historical figure and no mere legend, unlike Orpheus, Musaeus, Abaris and others. Certainly there is some convergence on the point that his teaching on the soul was exceptional, with most of our early sources suggesting that he taught a doctrine of metempsychosis. It is only in the Hellenistic period that Pythagoras' reputation as a mathematician, harmonic theorist and cosmologist takes off.