Four fascinating aspects of Pythagoras’ life – 10/29/2023 – Science

One of the earliest extant testimonies about Pythagoras was written in the 3rd century BC – and it doesn’t talk about mathematics, but about broad beans.

According to the ancient Greek biographer Hermippus of Smyrna, Pythagoras (570 BC-490 BC) was being pursued by a group of soldiers when he came across a field of broad beans.

Instead of going over the plants and destroying the broad beans, Pythagoras preferred to give himself up and was murdered by the soldiers.

It may be difficult to believe that the same Pythagoras we knew in high school – of irrational numbers and the famous theorem a² + b² = c² – preferred to save a broad bean plantation rather than his own life.

But the stories that have come down to us from Antiquity show that the mathematician was one of the most peculiar characters of his time.

Professor Christoph Riedweg, from the University of Zurich, Austria, is the author of the book Pythagoras: Leben, Lehre, Nachwirkung (“Pythagoras: life, teachings and influence”, in free translation from German).

He told BBC News Mundo – the BBC’s Spanish service – that the best way to define that precursor of Western thought might be as a “charismatic polymath”, considering the diversity of disciplines he studied.

It is difficult to know for sure who Pythagoras was. The few texts about him that have come down to us, more than two millennia later, were written by his contemporaries or by other authors, almost 150 years after his death.

These texts represent testimony about one of the most interesting characters of Antiquity.

1. The first ‘philosopher’

Currently, Pythagoras’ name is related to mathematics. But we know that, in his time, he was recognized as a scholar of different disciplines.

One of the first historical testimonies that make reference to the Greek polymath was written by his contemporary Heraclitus, from the 6th century BC:

“Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, practiced research more than any other man and, selecting these writings, produced wisdom for himself. Much learning, elaborate frauds.”

This type of reference to Pythagoras, which recognizes his extensive knowledge while calling him a charlatan, offers indications to historians, according to Christoph Riedweg.

On the one hand, they confirm that the Greek genius was already recognized in his time and, most importantly, they seem to confirm that he really existed.

“These early testimonies show us how his contemporaries reacted to his teachings and influence”, explains Riedweg.

At the same time, they show us that Pythagoras collected information from many sources to create his own thought. Excerpts attributed to the Greek thinker Heraclides of Pontus (387 BC-312 BC) guarantee that Pythagoras was the first to adopt the term “philosopher” to “highlight his love for knowledge”.

Riedweg states that, in the pre-Socratic era in which Pythagoras lived, “phylos” was a term used to praise the effort of a worker in his specific area. “Philoplemus”, according to him, was an extremely skilled warrior.

The professor considers it possible that Pythagoras coined the term “philosopher” to “differentiate himself and his followers from other contemporary thinkers.”

2. Mystic and diviner

One of the constant criticisms of Pythagoras by his contemporaries referred to his reputation as a “mystic”.

“One of the oldest fragments we have is that of Xenophon”, teaches Riedweg. “He jokingly tells a story according to which Pythagoras found some people beating a dog and asked them to stop, because he had recognized in the animal the voice of the soul of one of his friends.”

Riedweg explains that these episodes help to strengthen the image of Pythagoras as a “charismatic leader”.

“This way of talking to animals is very characteristic of charismatics in different cultures”, according to the professor. “Furthermore, the followers of a charismatic leader are convinced that he has transformed their world, while others, looking from the outside, consider him a fake.”

Art professor Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, in her book Measuring Heaven: Pythagoras and His Influence on Thought and Art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (“Measuring the sky: Pythagoras and his influence on thought and art in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages”, in free translation), highlights that this primitive story illustrates the historical character’s thinking.

“Xenophon attributes three fundamental convictions to Pythagoras: 1, human beings have a soul (a notion that was not common at the time); 2, the soul is immortal; and 3, at death, it passes from one being to another, in a process known as soul transmutation or metempsychosis.”

This same notion is used by ancient historians to justify the Pythagorean aversion to broad beans, according to Riedweg.

“One of the things that some ancient historians said is that souls have an element of air,” he said, “and since broad beans have a tendency to generate gases, they could cause the soul to escape the body.”

But the references to Pythagoras’ supernatural abilities don’t stop there.

Aristotle lived almost 150 years after the mystic and thinker. He considered Pythagoras to be a “mathematician with a great interest in numbers” who could “predict when a white bear would appear and die, and that he might bite and kill a poisonous snake that had bitten him.”

Aristotle also guaranteed that a river had greeted him by name (“Praise be Pythagoras!”) when the mathematician was preparing to cross it.

The philosopher Heraclides stated that “Pythagoras was able to remember at least four previous lives, including one in which he had been a Trojan named Euphorbus who lost his shield during a battle against Menelaus.”

3. Traveling philosopher

Many ancient historians agree that at least part of Pythagoras’ knowledge came from other cultures of the time.

“Thanks to the ancient biographies we have, such as that of Porphyry, we know that Pythagoras traveled a lot, mainly to Egypt”, says Riedweg.

“And the Greeks had a particular appreciation for cultures older than theirs, especially the Egyptian one”, adds the biographer, “because, for Greece, Egypt has always been a very ancient culture, with very high standards”.

Many of the ancient texts that reference Pythagoras speak of his travels.

Antiphon, for example (who would serve as a source for Porphyry), stated in the 4th century BC that Pythagoras learned to speak Egyptian directly from the pharaoh Amosis II and that he was the “only foreigner to be accepted to study with the priests in Thebes”.

Ancient historians also assured that it was there that Pythagoras learned the secrets of “metempsychosis”, or transmigration of souls.

And there are also references to the trips that Pythagoras would have made to Babylon, where historians today know that his famous theorem was used around 1,000 years before his birth.

“We know that [o teorema de Pitágoras] it was used in Babylon long before”, teaches Riedweg, “which makes us think that what Pythagoras probably did was offer a theoretical justification for the theorem”.

There are also testimonies that Pythagoras learned arithmetic from the Phoenicians and the magicians of Persia. There are even testimonies that link it to the teachings of Jewish prophets, such as Moses.

4. Natural philosophy

In Pythagoras’ time, some Greek thinkers moved away from the concept of gods and began to explore alternative ways of explaining what was happening in the world.

“[O filósofo grego] Tales [de Mileto] placed water at the center of his world”, according to Riedweg.

“He considered water to be absolutely essential, that everything is made of water. This was the pre-Socratic view of the world: there is a superficial appearance and beneath that are the real reasons.”

“For Pythagoras, the most basic thing, the fundamental thing, is number”, explains the professor.

In one of the few excerpts that remain from one of the first biographies of Pythagoras, his student Aristóxenes highlights what may have been the Greek genius’s most important contribution to Western thought:

“[Pitágoras] rescued and promoted the study of numbers more than anyone else, separating it from purely mercantilist practice and relating everything to numbers.”

Riedweg believes that this revelation could be obtained through his musical studies, which reveal the relationship between the division of a string and the sound it produces.

“I suppose that the discovery of the basic proportions of music was one of the most important discoveries made by Pythagoras”, according to him

Discovering the relationship between music and numbers may have encouraged Pythagoras to look for other similar relationships. And he ended up finding these relationships in everything, from the stars to people’s behavior.

Pythagoras believed, for example, that the movement of the stars and their relative distances agreed with musical intervals and that they should produce harmonic sounds (impossible to be perceived by human beings because they are constant), known as “the music of the spheres”.

“These pre-Socratic philosophers really were natural philosophers,” according to Riedweg. “It was a philosophy that could be compared with physics and cosmology, as they sought to explain everything in the world, from why a plant grows to why the Nile floods.”

“It was the philosophers who tried to decipher the rules that define the world”, according to the professor.

This text was originally published here.