Greek Texts & Translations

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.

Pythagoras met his death in this wise. ^note As he sat one day among his acquaintances at the house of Milo, it chanced that the house was set ablaze out of jealousy by one of the people who were not accounted worthy of admittance to his presence, though some say it was the work of the inhabitants of Croton anxious to safeguard themselves against the setting-up of a tyranny. Pythagoras was caught as he tried to escape; he got as far as a certain field of beans, where he stopped, saying he would be captured rather than cross it, and be killed rather than prate about his doctrines; and so his pursuers cut his throat. ^note So also were murdered more than half of his disciples, to the number of forty or thereabouts; but a very few escaped, including Archippus of Tarentum and Lysis, already mentioned.