Greek Texts & Translations

Right has the force of an oath, and that is why Zeus is called the God of Oaths. Virtue is harmony, and so are health and all good and God himself; this is why they say that all things are constructed according to the laws of harmony. The love of friends is just concord and equality. We should not pay equal worship to gods and heroes, but to the gods always, with reverent silence, in white robes, and after purification, to the heroes only from midday onwards. Purification is by cleansing, baptism and lustration, and by keeping clean from all deaths and births and all pollution, and abstaining from meat and flesh of animals that have died, mullets, gurnards, eggs and egg-sprung animals, beans, and the other abstinences prescribed by those who perform mystic rites in the temples. 8.1.34 According to Aristotle in his work On the Pythagoreans, Pythagoras counselled abstinence from beans either because they are like the genitals, or because they are like the gates of Hades . . . as being alone unjointed, or because they are injurious, or because they are like the form of the universe, or because they belong to oligarchy, since they are used in election by lot. He bade his disciples not to pick up fallen crumbs, either in order to accustom them not to eat immoderately, or because connected with a person's death; nay, even, according to Aristophanes, crumbs belong to the heroes, for in his Heroes he says ^note:

Nor taste ye of what falls beneath the board !

Another of his precepts was not to eat white cocks, as being sacred to the Month and wearing suppliant garb - now supplication ranked with things good - sacred to the Month because they announce the time of day ; and again white represents the nature of the good, black the nature of evil. Not to touch such fish as were sacred; for it is not right that gods and men should be allotted the same things, any more than free men and slaves. Not to break bread ; for once friends used to meet over one loaf, 8.1.35 as the barbarians do even to this day ; and you should not divide bread which brings them together; some give as the explanation of this that it has reference to the judgement of the dead in Hades, others that bread makes cowards in war, others again that it is from it that the whole world begins. ^note

He held that the most beautiful figure is the sphere among solids, and the circle among plane figures. Old age may be compared to everything that is decreasing, while youth is one with increase. Health means retention of the form, disease its destruction. Of salt he said it should be brought to table to remind us of what is right; for salt preserves whatever it finds, and it arises from the purest sources, sun and sea.

This is what Alexander says that he found in the Pythagorean memoirs. ^note What follows is Aristotle's.

But Pythagoras's great dignity not even Timon overlooked, who, although he digs at him in his Silli, ^note speaks of

Pythagoras, inclined to witching works and ways,

Man-snarer, fond of noble periphrase.

Xenophanes ^note confirms the statement about his having been different people at different times in the elegiacs beginning :

Now other thoughts, another path, I show.

What he says of him is as follows :

They say that, passing a belaboured whelp,

He, full of pity, spake these words of dole :

"Stay, smite not ! 'Tis a friend, a human soul ;

I knew him straight whenas I heard him yelp !"

Thus Xenophanes. But Cratinus also lampooned him both in the Pythagorizing Woman and also in The Tarentines, where we read ^note:

They are wont,

If haply they a foreigner do find,

To hold a cross-examination

Of doctrines' worth, to trouble and confound him

With terms, equations, and antitheses

Brain-bung'd with magnitudes and periphrases.

Again, Mnesimachus in the Alcmaeon ^note:

To Loxias we sacrifice : Pythagoras his rite,

Of nothing that is animate we ever take a bite.

And Aristophon in the Pythagorist ^note:

a. He told how he travelled in Hades and looked on the dwellers below,

How each of them lives, but how different by far from the lives of the dead

Were the lives of the Pythagoreans, for these alone, so he said, Were suffered to dine with King Pluto, which was for their piety's sake.

b. What an ill-tempered god for whom such swine, such creatures good company make ;

and in the same later :

Their food is just greens, and to wet it pure water is all that they drink ;

And the want of a bath, and the vermin, and their old threadbare coats so do stink

That none of the rest will come near them.