Pythagoras

Pythagoras of Samos was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and polymath, born around 570 BC and thought to have died around 495 BC. He became the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism, a movement whose political and religious teachings were well known in Magna Graecia. Modern scholars disagree about his education, influences, and even many details of his life. No authentic writings by him have survived, and the earliest accounts are brief, ambiguous, or satirical, while later biographies are filled with myths and legends.

A plausible outline begins on the island of Samos in the eastern Aegean, where Herodotus and Isocrates say he was the son of Mnesarchus. Samos in his youth was a thriving cultural center, known for advanced engineering such as the Tunnel of Eupalinos, active trade, and festival culture. It was also close to Miletus, home to early Ionian natural philosophy. Pythagoras was a contemporary of Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Hecataeus, and this wider world of inquiry helped form the setting in which his thought took shape.

Around 530 BC, Pythagoras travelled to Croton in southern Italy, where he founded a school. Its initiates were allegedly sworn to secrecy and lived a communal, ascetic life. The teaching most securely identified with him is metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, the belief that every soul is immortal and, after death, enters a new body. He may also have devised the doctrine of musica universalis, which holds that the planets move according to mathematical ratios and resonate in an inaudible music.

In antiquity, Pythagoras was credited with many mathematical and scientific discoveries: the Pythagorean theorem, Pythagorean tuning, the five regular solids, the theory of proportions, the sphericity of the Earth, the identity of the morning and evening stars as Venus, and the division of the globe into five climatic zones. He was also reputedly the first man to call himself a philosopher, a “lover of wisdom.” Historians debate whether these accomplishments were truly his, since some may have originated earlier or with colleagues and successors such as Hippasus and Philolaus.

His community also lived within the political tensions of its time. After Croton’s decisive victory over Sybaris around 510 BC, Pythagoras’s followers came into conflict with supporters of democracy, and their meeting houses were burned. Pythagoras may have been killed during this persecution, or he may have escaped to Metapontum and died there. However uncertain the details, his ideas continued to move through later thought. Plato’s dialogues, especially Timaeus, show Pythagorean ideas, and a revival of his teachings came in the first century BC among Middle Platonists.

Pythagoras remained a major figure through the Middle Ages, and Pythagoreanism influenced scientists including Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton. His teachings as portrayed in Ovid’s Metamorphoses later influenced the modern vegetarian movement. For a quotes reader, his appeal lies partly in that blend of discipline, mystery, number, and moral seriousness. “Do not look back when leaving” has the spare quality associated with his name: a sentence about action, restraint, and the cost of moving forward.