3. Life and Works
References to Pythagoras by Xenophanes (ca. 570–475 BCE) and Heraclitus (fl. ca. 500 BCE) show that he was a famous figure in the late sixth and early fifth centuries. For the details of his life we have to rely on fourth-century sources such as Aristoxenus, Dicaearchus and Timaeus of Tauromenium. There is a great deal of controversy about his origin and early life, but there is agreement that he grew up on the island of Samos, near the birthplace of Greek philosophy, Miletus, on the coast of Asia Minor. There are a number of reports that he traveled widely in the Near East while living on Samos, e.g., to Babylonia, Phoenicia and Egypt. To some extent reports of these trips are an attempt to claim the ancient wisdom of the east for Pythagoras, but relatively early sources such as Herodotus (II. 81) and Isocrates (Busiris 28) associate Pythagoras with Egypt, so that a trip there seems quite plausible. Aristoxenus says that he left Samos at the age of forty, when the tyranny of Polycrates, who came to power ca. 535 BCE, became unbearable (Porphyry, VP 9). This chronology would suggest that he was born ca. 570 BCE. He then emigrated to the Greek city of Croton in southern Italy ca. 530 BCE; it is in Croton that he first seems to have attracted a large number of followers to his way of life. There are a variety of stories about his death, but the most reliable evidence (Aristoxenus and Dicaearchus) suggests that violence directed against Pythagoras and his followers in Croton ca. 510 BCE, perhaps because of the exclusive nature of the Pythagorean way of life, led him to flee to another Greek city in southern Italy, Metapontum, where he died around 490 BCE (Porphyry, VP 54–7; Iamblichus, VP 248 ff.; On the chronology, see Minar 1942, 133–5). There is little else about his life of which we can be confident.
The evidence suggests that Pythagoras did not write any books. No source contemporaneous with Pythagoras or in the first two hundred years after his death, including Plato, Aristotle and their immediate successors in the Academy and Lyceum, quotes from a work by Pythagoras or gives any indication that any works written by him were in existence. Several later sources explicitly assert that Pythagoras wrote nothing (e.g., Lucian [Slip of the Tongue, 5], Josephus, Plutarch and Posidonius in DK 14A18; see Burkert 1972, 218–9). Diogenes Laertius tried to dispute this tradition by quoting Heraclitus' assertion that “Pythagoras, the son of Mnesarchus, practiced inquiry most of all men and, by selecting these things which have been written up, made for himself a wisdom, a polymathy, an evil conspiracy” (Fr. 129). This fragment shows only that Pythagoras read the writings of others, however, and says nothing about him writing something of his own. The wisdom and evil conspiracy that Pythagoras constructs from these writings need not have been in writing, and Heraclitus' description of it as an “evil conspiracy” rather suggests that it was not (For the translation and interpretation of Fr. 129, see Huffman 2008b). In the later tradition several books came to be ascribed to Pythagoras, but such evidence as exists for these books indicates that they were forged in Pythagoras' name and belong with the large number of pseudo-Pythagorean treatises forged in the name of early Pythagoreans such as Philolaus and Archytas. In the third century BCE a group of three books were circulating in Pythagoras' name, On Education, On Statesmanship, and On Nature (Diogenes Laertius, VIII. 6). A letter from Plato to Dion asking him to purchase these three books from Philolaus was forged in order to “authenticate” them (Burkert 1972a, 223–225). Heraclides Lembus in the second century BCE gives a list of six books ascribed to Pythagoras (Diogenes Laertius, VIII. 7; Thesleff 1965, 155–186 provides a complete collection of the spurious writings assigned to Pythagoras). The second of these is a Sacred Discourse, which some have wanted to trace back to Pythagoras himself. The idea that Pythagoras wrote such a Sacred Discourse seems to arise from a misreading of the early evidence. Herodotus says that the Pythagoreans agreed with the Egyptians in not allowing the dead to be buried in wool and then asserts that there is a sacred discourse about this (II. 81). Herodotus' focus here is the Egyptians and not the Pythagoreans, who are introduced as a Greek parallel, so that the Sacred Discourse to which he refers is Egyptian and not Pythagorean, as similar passages elsewhere in Book II of Herodotus show (e.g., II. 62; see Burkert 1972a, 219). Various lines of hexameter verse were already circulating in Pythagoras' name in the third century BCE and were later combined into a compilation known as the Golden Verses, which marks the culmination of the tradition of a Sacred Discourse assigned to Pythagoras (Burkert 1972a, 219, Thesleff 1965, 158–163; and most recently Thom 1995, although his dating of the compilation before 300 BCE is questionable). The lack of any viable written text which could be reasonably ascribed to Pythagoras is shown most clearly by the tendency of later authors to quote either Empedocles or Plato, when they needed to quote “Pythagoras” (e.g., Sextus Empiricus, M. IX. 126–30; Nicomachus, Introduction to Arithmetic I. 2). For an interesting but ultimately unconvincing attempt to argue that the historical Pythagoras did write books, see Riedweg 2005, 42–43 and the response by Huffman 2008a, 205–207.