Pythagoras

and so Pythagoras said that it is reasonable to help a man take up a burden, but not to help him lay it down.

The Pythagorean philosophy, the Italic, grew old at Metapontum in Italy.

Pythagoras is found in the time of Polycrates the tyrant, about the sixty-second Olympiad.

Xenocrates denied that the soul has any shape or, as it were, body, and said it is number, whose power, as had already been Pythagoras's view, is greatest in nature.

who, having come into Italy in the reign of Tarquinius Superbus, held that Great Greece in his grip both by his teaching and by his authority, and for many ages thereafter the name of the Pythagoreans so flourished that no others seemed learned.

they say that Plato came into Italy to acquaint himself with the Pythagoreans, and learned all things Pythagorean, and was the first not only to hold the same view as Pythagoras concerning the eternity of souls, but also to bring forward a reason for it.

Nor am I in the habit of approving the practice we are told of among the Pythagoreans, who, when they affirmed something in argument and were asked why it was so, used to answer "He himself said it" — "he himself" being Pythagoras:

As for Pythagoras, who held that soul is spread throughout the whole nature of things and passes through it, and that from it our souls are taken, he did not see that, by the tearing-asunder of human souls, the god is rent and mangled, and that when souls are wretched — as happens to most — then a part of the god is wretched, which cannot be.

Nor do you hide it from me as Pythagoras was wont to hide things from strangers, nor do you speak obscurely on purpose like Heraclitus;

But Pythagoras said that there was a kinship of all things with all, and a commerce of souls passing into one shape and another.

Since I have begun to set forth to you with how much greater an onset I came to philosophy as a youth than I go on with it as an old man, I shall not be ashamed to confess what love Pythagoras instilled in me.

Among the followers of Pythagoras the disciples had to keep silence for five years;

such as Orpheus, such as Musaeus, such as Pherecydes the teacher of Pythagoras.

’ But I know it does not happen so, since you set Pythagoras-Euphorbus against me.

But if the Samian sophist is Plato's authority concerning the relapse of souls, ever rolled back out of the alternate substitution of dead and living, certainly that Pythagoras, though good in other respects, yet, in order to build up this opinion, leaned upon a lie not only base but even rash.

For you know that I once came with you to Metapontum, and did not turn aside to my host before I had seen that very spot where Pythagoras had ended his life, and his seat.

Those who do not see these things have never loved anything great and worthy of knowledge.

Why did Pythagoras himself both survey Egypt and go to the magi of the Persians?

but you have heard, I believe, Tubero, that after the death of Socrates, Plato journeyed first into Egypt to learn, and afterward into Italy and Sicily, that he might thoroughly master the discoveries of Pythagoras;

From which it may be understood, the regnal years being reckoned, that it was about a hundred and forty years after the death of Numa that Pythagoras first touched Italy;

When Scipio had said this, "Is it true," said Manilius, "Africanus, that it has been handed down to memory that this king Numa was a disciple of Pythagoras himself, or at least a Pythagorean?

Not Pythagoras?

yet all these remain in figure and place, even if no one moves them, so far as in them lies the bronze that cannot run, even if it have wings, like the Perseus of Pythagoras.

And Pythagoras fled willingly from Samos when it was under a tyranny, but among all other men, and especially, I think, about Italy, he was honoured as a god.

For this whole body of the world — whether unborn and unmade, as Pythagoras holds, or born and made, as Plato holds — once for all, in its construction, was found ordered and equipped and arranged with every governance of reason.

If I contend on the score of modesty — behold, Pythagoras among the Thurians, Zeno among the Prienians, aim at tyranny:

some say he is of atoms, others of numbers, as Epicurus and Pythagoras;

but I think that he lived many years before Pythagoras;

for he had consorted with Greeks, and moreover with one of the greatest Greek teachers, Pythagoras;

I understand from the Greeks who live beside the Hellespont and Pontus, that this Salmoxis was a man who was once a slave in Samos, his master being Pythagoras son of Mnesarchus;

And one must remember Pythagoras, who, perceiving one of his companions fattening himself well with exercises and food, said thus:

And the deed of Cleinias, one of the disciples of Pythagoras, it is hard to believe came about by chance to accord with our precepts, and not rather by deliberate imitation.

It is said too that Pythagoras, falling in with drunken revellers, bade the flute-player who led the revel change the harmony and pipe to them the Dorian strain, and that they thereby came so to their senses through the melody that, casting away their crowns, they went home ashamed.

10, the evidence upon which the construction of the five regular solids is attributed to the Pythagoreans.

says that the Book is about the five so-called Platonic figures, which however do not belong to Plato, three of the aforesaid five figures being due to the Pythagoreans, namely the cube, the pyramid and the dodecahedron, while the octahedron and the icosahedron are due to Theaetetus.

Aelian has preserved a saying of Pythagoras, “that there are two things, in which man approaches nearest to God, in always speaking the truth, and doing good to others.

For so greatly did he surpass all others in reputation that all the younger men desired to be his pupils, and their elders were more pleased to see their sons staying in his company than attending to their private affairs.

on the contrary, many contemporaries and predecessors have remarked it, of whom Pythagoras of Samos is one On a visit to Egypt he became a student of the religion of the people, and was first to bring to the Greeks all philosophy, and more conspicuously than others he seriously interested himself in sacrifices and in ceremonial purity, since he believed that even if he should gain thereby no great …

Thither we too must change our place — where so many mighty orators, so many grave philosophers, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates;

Well, then, if no public service is credited to him, is Homer reported while he lived to have been a guide in education to men who took pleasure in associating with him and transmitted to posterity a certain Homeric way of life just as Pythagoras was himself especially honored for this, and his successors, even to this day, denominating a certain way of life the Pythagorean, are distinguished amon …

Pythagoras used to compose the disturbances of his mind with the lyre;

We may rightly say that those linger upon true duties who choose to have Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, and the other high priests of good learning, and Aristotle and Theophrastus, as their closest intimates day by day.

Yet it is enough that the philosophy of Pythagoras and Empedocles and the Platonists, no smaller, cries out to the contrary that the soul is immortal — indeed they go further and most nearly affirm that it may return into bodies, though not into the same ones, though not into human bodies only, so that Euphorbus is reckoned to pass into Pythagoras, and Homer into a peacock.

such as I shall find in Marcion, in Tatian, in Jupiter, the heretic of today after Pythagoras—not in the Paraclete.

and the ships from Peloponnesus arrived to meet Cyrus, thirty-five in number, with Pythagoras the Lacedaemonian as admiral in command of them.