Pythagoras E-Book

Kitty Ferguson

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 614

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This is the story of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, whose insights transformed the ancient world and still inspire the realms of science, mathematics, philosophy and the arts. Einstein said that the most incredible thing about our universe was that it was comprehensible at all. As Kitty Ferguson explains, Pythagoras had much the same idea - but 2,500 years earlier. Though known by many only for his famous Theorem, in fact the pillars of our scientific tradition - belief that the universe is rational, that there is unity to all things, and that numbers and mathematics are a powerful guide to truth about nature and the cosmos - hark back to the convictions of this legendary scholar. Kitty Ferguson brilliantly evokes Pythagoras' ancient world of, showing how ideas spread in antiquity, and chronicles the incredible influence he and his followers have had on so many extraordinary people in the history of Western thought and science. 'Pythagoras' influence on the ideas, and therefore on the destiny, of the human race was probably greater than that of any single man before or after him' - Arthur Koestler.

Leseprobe

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Tycho & Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens

Measuring the Universe: Our Historic Quest to Chart the Horizons of Space and Time

The Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion, and the Search for God

Prisons of Light: Black Holes

Stephen Hawking: Quest for a Theory of Everything

Previously published in the USA in 2008 by

Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York

Published in the UK in 2010 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.co.uk

This electronic edition published in 2010 by Icon Books

ISBN: 978-1-84831-250-0 (ePub format)

ISBN: 978-1-84831-251-7 (Adobe ebook format)

Printed edition (ISBN: 978-1-84831-192-3)

sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA

or their agents

Printed edition distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,

Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Printed edition published in Australia in 2010

by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Text copyright © 2010 Kitty Ferguson

The author has asserted her moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any

means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

To Serafina Clarke

Contents

By the Same Author

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Acknowledgements

Lifetimes and Other Significant Dates

Map

Part I: Sixth Century B.C.

Chapter 0: ‘At the hinge of legend and history’

Chapter 1: The Long-haired Samian

Chapter 2: ‘Entirely different from the institutions of the Greeks’

Chapter 3: ‘Among them was a man of immense knowledge’

Chapter 4: ‘My true race is of Heaven’

Chapter 5: ‘All things known have number’

Chapter 6: ‘The Famous Figure of Pythagoras’

Part II: Fifth Century B.C.–Seventh Century A.D.

Chapter 7: A Book by Philolaus the Pythagorean

Chapter 8: Plato’s Search for Pythagoras

Chapter 9: ‘The ancients, our superiors, who dwelt nearer to the gods, have passed this word on to us’

Chapter 10: From Aristotle to Euclid

Chapter 11: The Roman Pythagoras

Chapter 12: Through Neo-Pythagorean and Ptolemaic Eyes

Chapter 13: The Wrap-up of Antiquity

Part III: Eighth–Twenty-first Centuries A.D.

Chapter 14: ‘Dwarfs on the shoulders of giants’: Pythagoras in the Middle Ages

Chapter 15: ‘Wherein Nature shows herself most excellent and complete’

Chapter 16: ‘While the morning stars sang together’: Johannes Kepler

Chapter 17: Enlightened and Illuminated

Chapter 18: Janus Face

Chapter 19: The Labyrinths of Simplicity

Epilogue: Music or Silence

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

A Note on the Author

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank all those friends who, during the years when I was researching and writing this book, have told me about ways – some of them odd and unexpected – that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans have made an impact, or at least an appearance, in their own fields of study and interest. I also wish to thank my husband, Yale, for the help he has given me out of his own historical knowledge and library, his wonderful company on research journeys to Samos and Crotone, and his invaluable early critique of this book; Eleanor Robson, for her patient help in the area of Mesopotamian mathematics; John Barrow, for calling my attention to the ‘Sulba-Sûtras’ and reconstructing the tunnel of Eupalinos on Samos for me out of a dinner napkin; the staff of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Crotone for their extraordinary helpfulness; and the librarians at the Chester Public Library, for their skill and willingness when I came to them with numerous unusual interlibrary loan requests.

Lifetimes and Other Significant Dates

CHAPTER 1

Pythagoras c. 570–500 B.C.

Thales fl. c. 585 B.C.

Anaximander 610–546 B.C.

Diogenes Laertius fl. c. A.D. 193–217

Porphyry c. A.D. 233–306

Iamblichus of Chalcis c. A.D. 260–330

CHAPTER 2

Babylonian exile of the Hebrews 598/7 and 587/6 to 538 B.C.

Rule of the Samian tyrant Polykrates 535–522 B.C.

CHAPTERS 3–6

Pythagoras’ arrival in Croton 532/531 B.C.

Croton defeats and destroys Sybaris 510 B.C.

Death or disappearance of Pythagoras 500 B.C.

Second decimation of the Pythagoreans 454 B.C.

CHAPTER 7

Philolaus c. 474–399? B.C.

Parmenides 515 or 540–mid-5th century B.C.

Melissus early 5th century–late 5th century B.C.

Zeno of Elea c. 490–mid to late 5th century B.C.

Socrates c. 470–399 B.C.

CHAPTER 8

Plato 427–347 B.C.

Archytas 428–347 B.C.

Dionysius the Elder c. 430–367 B.C.

Dionysius the Younger 397–343 B.C.

Aristoxenus of Tarentum fl. fourth century B.C.

CHAPTER 9

Socrates c. 470–399 B.C.

Plato 427–347 B.C.

CHAPTER 10

Aristotle 384–322 B.C.

Theophrastus 372–287 B.C.

Alexander the Great 356–323 B.C.

Heracleides Ponticus 387–312 B.C.

Dicaearchus of Messina fl. c. 320 B.C.

Euclid fl. c. 300 B.C.

CHAPTER 11

Cicero 106–43 B.C.

Numa ruled c. 715–673 B.C.

Ennius c. 239–c. 160 B.C.

Marcus Fulvius Nobilior 2nd century B.C.

Cato the Elder 234–149 B.C.

Pliny the Elder A.D. 23–79

Posidonius c. 135–51 B.C.

Sextus Empiricus fl. 3rd century A.D.

Eudorus of Alexandria fl. c. 25 BC

Nigidius Figulus fl. no later than 98–27 B.C.

Vitruvius fl. 1st century B.C.

Occelus of Lucania after Aristotle

CHAPTER 12

Eudorus of Alexandria fl. c. 25 B.C.

Sotion 1st century A.D.

Seneca c. 4 B.C.–A.D. 65

‘Sextians’ 1st century A.D.

Apollonius of Tyana 1st century A.D.

Alexander of Abonuteichos c. A.D. 110–170

Julia Domna died A.D. 217

Philostratus A.D. 170–c. 245

Philo of Alexandria 20 B.C.–A.D. 40

Ovid 43 B.C.–A.D. 17

Plutarch A.D. 45–125

Moderatus of Gades 1st century A.D.

Theon of Smyrna c. A.D. 70–130/140

Nicomachus fl. c. A.D. 100

Numenius of Apamea fl. late 2nd century A.D.

Ptolemy c. A.D. 100–c. 180

CHAPTER 13

Diogenes Laertius fl. A.D. 193–217

Porphyry c. A.D. 233–306

Iamblichus of Chalcis c. A.D. 260–330

Longinus A.D. 213–273

Plotinus A.D. 204–270

Macrobius A.D. 395–423

Boethius c. A.D. 470–524

CHAPTER 14

Hunayn 9th century

Brethren of Purity 10th century

Al-Hasan 10th century

Aurelian 9th century

John Scotus Eriugena c. 815–c. 877

Regino of Prüm died 915

Raymund of Toledo 1125–1152

King Roger of Sicily 1095–1154

Bernard of Chartres 12th century

Nicole d’Oresme 14th century

Nicholas of Cusa 1401–1464

Franchino Gaffurio 1451–1522

CHAPTER 15

Petrarch 1304–1374

Nicholas of Cusa 1401–1464

Leon Battista Alberti 1407–1472

Marsilio Ficino 1433–1499

Pico della Mirandola 1463–1494

Giorgio Anselmi 15th century

Nicolaus Copernicus 1473–1543

Andrea Palladio 1508–1580

Tycho Brahe 1546–1601

CHAPTER 16

Philipp Melanchthon 1497–1560

Tycho Brahe 1546–1601

Michael Mästlin 1550–1631

Johannes Kepler 1571–1630

CHAPTER 17

Vincenzo Galilei late 1520s–1591

Galileo Galilei 1564–1642

William Shakespeare c. 1564–1616

John Milton 1608–1674

John Dryden 1631–1700

Joseph Addison 1672–1719

René Descartes 1596–1650

Robert Hooke 1635–1703

Robert Boyle 1627–1691

Isaac Newton 1642–1727

Gottfried Leibniz 1646–1716

Carl Linnaeus 1707–1778

William Wordsworth 1770–1850

Pierre-Simon de LaPlace 1749–1827

Filippo Michele Buonarroti 1761–1837

Hans Christian Oersted 1777–1851

Michael Faraday 1791–1867

James Clerk Maxwell 1831–1879

CHAPTER 18

Bertrand Russell 1872–1970

Arthur Koestler 1905–1983

PART I

Sixth Century B.C.

CHAPTER 0

‘At the hinge of legend and history’

On the Aegean island ofSamos,on the narrow arm of the harbour that juts farthest out to sea, there is a stark, skeletal structure. Immense shards of iron look as though they have fallen from the sky in the shape of a huge right triangle. One end of the diagonal has buried itself in the ground. Instead of a vertical line rising from the right angle, there is the statue of a man – lean, elongated, taller than life. He is reaching up with his right arm as though to conjure down the broken piece of iron that, if it were complete, would form the vertical of the triangle. Between his fingers and its lowest tip is a gap, such a gap as separates the finger of God from the finger of Adam in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The triangle is not this man’s creation. It is as old as the universe, as old as truth.

There is no argument but that this monument captures Western civilisation’s image of Pythagoras, a native son of this magical island. The triangle is his classic symbol . . . but, more authentically, he has become the icon of an unexplained but undeniable gift: the ability of human minds to connect with the bedrock rationality of the universe.

Behind all the veneration of Pythagoras and the undeniably great heritage attributed to him and his followers, behind the assumptions about his accomplishments, the uncritical early biographies, the legends, the debunkings, the forgeries, there was a real person. Who he was, actually – except for illusive wisps of information – is lost in the past.

Pythagoras and the devotees who surrounded him during his lifetime were obsessively secretive. As far as is known, they left no writings at all. There is no scroll, no text, no fragment, no firsthand account by any witness, no artefact for archaeologists to scrutinise, no tablet to decipher. If such ever existed, they no longer did by late antiquity. The earliest written evidence about Pythagoras himself that modern scholarship accepts as genuine consists of six short fragments of text from the century after his death, found not in their originals but in works of ancient authors who either saw the originals or were quoting from earlier secondary copies. The Pythagorean doctrine of reincarnation is the subject of three of these fragments, two of which also mention Pythagoras’ courage, knowledge, and wisdom. Two others are scornful and derogatory. The sixth is a backhanded compliment in the middle of an unrelated story by the historian Herodotus, who termed Pythagoras ‘by no means the feeblest of the Greek sages’. None name any discoveries, pinpoint any quotable wisdom or scientific contribution, or give biographical details. Though some treatises about Pythagoras tell you that his contemporaries seem not to have been aware of his existence, that was not the case, for all these fragments assume that Pythagoras was a famous man whose name readers would recognise. That, of course, has continued to be true for two thousand, five hundred years, in spite of the fact that as early as the time of Plato, in the fourth century B.C., Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans were already a mystery, and today they are often described as ‘an ancient cult about whom almost nothing is known’.

Those six early fragments are not, however, the full extent of the available evidence about the Pythagoreans – those men and women who followed Pythagoras during his lifetime and who in later generations went on trying to live out his teachings. Philolaus, a not-so-secretive Pythagorean, wrote a book fifty to seventy-five years after Pythagoras’ death, revealing that early Pythagoreans proposed that the Earth moves and is not the centre of the cosmos. Plato knew Pythagoreans in the fourth century B.C., was strongly influenced by the idea of the role of numbers in nature and creation, and tried to incorporate what he thought of as a Pythagorean curriculum – the ‘quadrivium’ – at his Academy in Athens. Aristotle and his pupils wrote extensively about the Pythagoreans a few years later, relying on earlier material that still existed then but has since vanished, and on carefully chosen living spokesmen for the oral tradition, before a time when that became contaminated by forgeries. This present book will return frequently to the issues of evidence and how it was and is evaluated. It seems no other group has ever made such an effort to remain secret, or succeeded so well, as the Pythagoreans did – and yet become so celebrated and influential over such an astonishingly long period of time.

In an attempt to cut through the multilayered veil of twenty-five centuries that hangs between us and whatever happened on the ancient isle of Samos and in the harbour city of Croton, sceptical twentieth-century historians insisted on discarding all but the most concrete, ‘hard’ historical evidence. Though certainly they were right to believe a corrective was needed, they arguably pruned too much, applying standards of their own time to an era for which it was inappropriate and even misleading to do so. The tiny ‘core of truth’ left after discounting all folk wisdom, semi-historic tradition, legend or what might be only legend, and blatant forgeries and inventions can be stated in one paragraph:

Pythagoras of Samos left his native Aegean island in about 530 B.C. and settled in the Greek colonial city of Croton, on the southern coast of Italy. Though the date of his birth is not certain, he was probably by that time about forty years old and a widely experienced, charismatic individual. In Croton, he had a significant impact as a teacher and religious leader; he taught a doctrine of reincarnation, became an important figure in political life, made dangerous enemies, and eventually, in about 500 B.C., had to flee to another coastal city, Metapontum, where he died. During his thirty years in Croton, some of the men and women who gathered to sit at his feet began, with him, to ponder and investigate the world. While experimenting with lyres and considering why some combinations of string lengths produced beautiful sounds and others did not, Pythagoras, or others who were encouraged and inspired by him, discovered that the connections between lyre string lengths and human ears are not arbitrary or accidental. The ratios that underlie musical harmony make sense in a remarkably simple way. In a flash of extraordinary clarity, the Pythagoreans found that there is pattern and order hidden behind the apparent variety and confusion of nature, and that it is possible to understand it through numbers. Tradition has it that, literally and figuratively, they fell to their knees upon discovering that the universe is rational. ‘Figuratively’, at least, is surely accurate, for the Pythagoreans embraced this discovery to the extent of allowing numbers to lead them, perhaps during Pythagoras’ lifetime and certainly shortly after his death, to some extremely far-sighted and also some off-the-wall, premature notions about the world and the cosmos.

One might assume that the above paragraph is a summary merely touching the highlights of what is known about events in sixth-century B.C. Croton, but it is, in fact,allthat is known. Though you and I might wish to ask many more questions, the answers are irretrievably lost. No one can claim to tell how Pythagoras and his followers arrived at the religious and philosophical doctrines they espoused, or even precisely what these were . . . or in what specific ways Pythagoras and his followers influenced and changed the culture and civic structure of Croton and the surrounding area . . . or whether whatever caused Pythagoras and his followers to make such volatile enemies was something we would condemn or applaud today . . . or whether the great discovery in music of the power of numbers to reveal truth about the universe was made by Pythagoras himself. It may come as a particular surprise that there has been no mention of a Pythagorean triangle or a Pythagorean theorem in this ‘core of knowledge’ about Pythagoras.

While historians in the twentieth century were clearing the deck, archaeologists were also playing a role in bringing down the legendary Pythagoras. They uncovered evidence that the ‘Pythagorean theorem’ (or the ‘Pythagorean rule’, for ‘theorem’ implies a concept that was unrecognised this early) was known long before Pythagoras. Those revelations were not the end of the discussion, for with regard to such knowledge, there is more to be answered than the question of who had it ‘first’. The way it passed – or may have passed – or failed to pass – from society to society and era to era is a complex, fascinating subject. Was it known and then lost? Or only partly lost? Were there separate discoveries? Equally significant is the way different societies and eras regarded such knowledge, what meaning they attached to it. Was it useful for surveying and building? Was it valued for the way it helped produce beautiful design? Was it considered holy? Was it something to be shared, or to be held in strictest secrecy, or taught only to a few? Was it intriguing in and of itself? Or did it imply something about – or raise questions about – the nature of all being? Did it buttress, or tear down, a trust in the power of numbers to uncover secret truth about the universe? Was there a ‘proof’? What constituted ‘proof’ before the modern concept of ‘proof’? With questions like those, the origin of the ‘Pythagorean theorem’ becomes an extremely interesting and complicated issue.

Numbers and mathematics had been in use for eons before Pythagoras was born, sometimes with more sophisticated understanding than his and his followers’. Their insight in the realm of music was extraordinary in a different way – different from the practical use of numbers or from an artist’s appreciation for a beautiful geometric figure. Different even from the more abstract thinking of an early Babylonian teacher or student who found it an interesting exercise to do the maths for a grain pile far larger than could ever be constructed. Imagine a carpenter looking at the hammer and chisel that he holds in his hands, that he has been taking for granted as a useful part of his daily work, and in an instant of dumbfounded recognition seeing that he holds the keys to unlock the doorway to vast hidden knowledge. That was what numbers became for the Pythagoreans and, through them, for the future. With this fresh appreciation – indeed, veneration – of the power of numbers, Pythagoras and his followers made one of the most profound and significant discoveries in the history of human thought. They stood at the sort of threshold that humanity has crossed only a few times. This particular door would not close again.

The brutally pared-down picture of Pythagoras and the events of his life offered by the twentieth century was no more satisfactory a representation than the one that overcredulous earlier centuries had accepted. All that could be said for it was that it was probablynot wrong. But, for me, it has caused a dramatic refocusing of my attention onto the enormous, rich, multilayered, continuously reimagined story of ‘Pythagoras’ – as seen separately from the life and person of the historical Pythagoras. That is the reason this book ends in the twenty-first century rather than in antiquity.

Amazingly it is the uncertainty about what really occurred and who Pythagoras really was and what he accomplished that has allowed something astounding to happen through the centuries. One truly powerful idea did come authentically from Pythagoras and his earliest followers – the recognition that numbers are a pathway from human ignorance to an understanding of the deepest mysteries of a universe that on some profound level makes perfect sense and is all of a piece. That vision has been a premier guide in the development of science and remains so today. However, the scarcity of sure knowledge about nearly everything else connected with Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans has encouraged generation after generation, beginning as early as Plato and still continuing in the twenty-first century, to reimagine him, to recreate him, to fashion their own variations on the theme of Pythagoras. As composers do in music, such figures as Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, heroes of the French Revolution, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, and those who are now seeking extraterrestrial intelligence have taken a very slim theme indeed and composed intricate, sometimes whimsical, sometimes weird, often magnificent variations – a metaphor not inappropriate for a story that began with the strings of a lyre.

Two and a half millennia of writing and thinking and myth-making and composing variations about Pythagoras in one context after another, with one agenda after another, have of course multiplied the difficulties for a ‘biographer’. Even more difficult to sort out than the outspoken detractors and obvious distortions and forgeries are those who, encountering Pythagorean or pseudo-Pythagorean thought, have joyfully recognised its links with their own thoughts and taken off from there, calling itallPythagorean, even attributing their best ideas to Pythagoras himself – as Isaac Newton, of all people, did. Or callingnoneof it Pythagorean, but leaving the way open for others to say it was. Perhaps an author should abandon all hope of nonfiction and write a novel. To a certain extent, that is what two and a half millennia have written.

All of which might cause one to conclude that this book must be a postmodern parable. It would be difficult to find a better example of ideas, a life story, or a person being re-imagined time after time, century after century. Instead, I have come to see ‘Pythagoras’ as a cubist painting, a Picasso or a Braque – either of whom would have insisted that there is more truth in their cubist paintings than in a photolike portrait. Life and history are impossible to fit together in a completely satisfying, coherent picture – and are continually reinvented in the eye of the beholder.

This book begins with something resembling a conventional ‘biography’, indulging in calculated speculation, recounting legends and rumours, reporting intriguing and sometimes conflicting information, trying to discern what most likely happened – or might have happened – given the time and place and context. Much of the information comes through the research of three authors who wrote biographies of Pythagoras seven to eight hundred years after his death, in the third and early fourth centuries A.D., who in their time pieced together second-, third-, and fourth-hand accounts, legends and hearsay, oral tradition, what people believed or guessed, and other writers’ references to lost works – ancient material that ranges from the reliable to the well-meaning and intelligent to the ridiculous. Pythagoras was already a cubist painting, but these three accounts more than any other sources have influenced what the world has thought it knew and still thinks it knows about him.

From the time of those biographies, the Pythagorean story wound its way into the Middle Ages and eventually into the modern world. It followed what is by no means a satisfying linear path. There are threads and trends, but more remarkable is the unavoidable impression that the idea of Pythagoras existed and still exists on an almost subliminal level. It shows up not only where you might expect it, underpinning the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and Stephen Hawking, but also in odd, unlikely places such as the architecture of Palladio and the philosophical interpretation of the French Revolution, and a grandfatherly figure in a novel by Louisa May Alcott. In spite of all the twentieth-century scepticism, impressive thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Arthur Koestler, and Jacob Bronowski regarded Pythagoras as a towering, foundational figure. Pythagorean principles have become imbedded in our worldview, and the original Pythagorean cracking of the code underpins the continuing development of science.

Lament the lost story of the life and person of Pythagoras, if you will, but join me in attempting to understand why and how it has birthed and nurtured such a rich tradition and wealth of interpretation, and in celebrating what is not a myth or a lie or even a legend . . . but one beautiful instance of realisation about the truth of the universe.

CHAPTER 1

The Long-haired Samian

Sixth Century B.C.

In imperial Rome, there wasa popular myth that the ancient sage Pythagoras had been the son of Apollo. The story was spread in the first century A.D. by Apollonius of Tyana, an itinerant wonder-worker who claimed he was the reincarnated Pythagoras and could speak with authority. The empress Julia Domna, wife of the emperor Septimus Severus, saw to it that Apollonius’ tales were well publicised, in the hope of rivalling Jesus of Nazareth, whose followers believed that he was the son of the god of the Hebrews.

A century after Julia Domna (eight centuries after Pythagoras), the story of Pythagoras’ divine patrimony came into the hands of the neo-Platonist philosopher and historian Iamblichus of Chalcis, who was writing a book titledPythagorean Life.1Living in a superstitious age, he was not a particularly sceptical biographer when it came to the miraculous. He weighed carefully not whether he should believe ‘marvellous’ tales, but which to believe, and he balked at the report that Pythagoras was descended from a god. It was ‘by no means to be admitted’. Iamblichus did not, however, merely ignore myths that he could not accept as truth, nor should a historian have done so when sorting out the sixth century B.C. – this era that Jacob Bronowski called the ‘hinge of legend and history’. Iamblichus liked to speculate about why a myth had arisen. Here is his version of Pythagoras’ birth story, sanitised of what he saw as unduly supernatural details:

In the first third of the sixth century B.C., a merchant seaman named Mnesarchus embarked on a voyage, unaware that his wife was in the early stages of pregnancy. As most important merchants of his time who had the opportunity would have done, he included Delphi on his itinerary and enquired of the oracle – the Pythian Apollo – whether the remainder of his venture would be a success. The oracle replied that the next portion of the journey, to Syria, was going to be particularly productive. Then the oracle changed the subject: Mnesarchus’ wife was already pregnant with a son who would be surpassingly beautiful and wise, and of ‘the greatest benefit to the human race in everything pertaining to human achievements’. This was an astounding pronouncement, but Iamblichus insisted it was no indication that the son was not Mnesarchus’ child. It was to honour the oracle, not to imply the patrimony of Apollo, that Mnesarchus changed his wife’s name from Parthenis to Pythais and decided to name the boy Pythagoras. The voyage continued, and Pythais gave birth at Sidon in Phoenicia. Then the family returned to their home on the island of Samos. As the oracle had predicted, the mercantile venture had been a success and added substantially to their wealth. Mnesarchus erected a temple to the Pythian Apollo. No identifiable trace of it has survived, but Samos is sprinkled with the ruins of temples and shrines from that period that cannot now be attributed either to a particular god or donor.

The two other authors who lived during the time of the Roman Empire and wrote ‘lives’ of Pythagoras in the third and early fourth centuries A.D. – Diogenes Laertius and Porphyry – were in agreement with Iamblichus that there was ample evidence Pythagoras’ mother Pythais was descended from the earliest colonists on Samos.2[1]However, there is no other part of Pythagoras’ life story, until the events surrounding his death, about which the discussion among them became so animated and contradictory as it did regarding his father Mnesarchus’ origins. Iamblichus’ research indicated that both parents traced their ancestry to the first colonists on Samos. Porphyry was in possession of a conflicting report from a third century B.C. historian named Neanthes – a stickler for juxtaposing conflicting pieces of information – that Mnesarchus was not Samian by birth. Neanthes had had it from one source that Mnesarchus was born in Tyre (in Syria) and from another that he was an Etruscan (Tyrrhenian) from Lemnos. The similarity of the names ‘Tyre’ and ‘Tyrrhenian’ had perhaps caused the confusion. Porphyry referred to an additional source, a book with an enticing title, On the Incredible Things Beyond Thule, that also mentioned Mnesarchus’ Etruscan and Lemnos origins. Diogenes Laertius, the earliest of the three biographers, pointed out that the responsible ancient historian Aristoxenus of Tarentum – with excellent contacts, such as Dionysius the Younger of Syracuse and Pythagoreans in the fourth century B.C. – also had said Mnesarchus was a Tyrrhenian. All three biographers agreed that if Mnesarchus was not Samian by birth, he was naturalised on Samos. Diogenes Laertius also threw in that he had learned from one Hermippus, a native of Samos in the third century B.C., that Mnesarchus was a gem engraver.

The island of Samos, Pythagoras’ childhood home, is the most precipitous and thickly forested of the Greek islands. Jacob Bronowski called it a ‘magical island. Other Greek islands will do as a setting for The Tempest, but for me this is Prospero’s island, the shore where the scholar turned magician.’3The boy Pythagoras would have been familiar with forest-clad mountain slopes, deep wooded gorges, and misty outlines of half-barren coastlines on a cobalt sea. For a family of the landholding class, life in the countryside, in this climate where flowers bloom most of the year and grape vines and olive groves proliferate, was pleasant, probably luxurious, even more so with goods Mnesarchus brought home from trips abroad. In poetry of which only fragments survive, Asius described the Samian aristocracy as wearing ‘snow-white tunics’, ‘golden brooches’, ‘cunningly worked bracelets’, and wrote of their ‘tresses’ that ‘waved in the wind in golden bands’.4

In the port city and the precincts of Samos’ temple of the goddess Hera were goods, treasures, and curiosities to carry a young man’s imagination to the borders of the world. The temple had acquired a collection of valuable ornaments from Iran, Mesopotamia, Libya, Spain, and even farther away. Archaeologists have found no other Greek site so rich in foreign material, no ancient site anywhere with so wide a geographical spectrum of offerings. Not only Hera acquired treasures. Imported household and luxury items brought foreign textures, smells, and colours into Samian homes and no doubt fed the dreams and adventurous spirits of young men like Pythagoras and his brothers. Samos was in close touch with the much more ancient and mysterious culture of Mesopotamia.

What is known of Samos’ history is a combination of folk memory, oral history, and archaeology. By legend, the first settlers were led by Ankaios, a hero son of Zeus who had sailed with Hercules and Orpheus on the voyage of the Argonauts in pursuit of the Golden Fleece. At the behest of the Pythian oracle at Delphi, Ankaios had decided to establish a colony and brought families from Arcadia, Thessaly, Athens, Epidaurus, and Chalcis. The oracle dictated the name of the future great city of the island, Samos. ‘Sama’implied great heights, and Samos has high mountains. Ancient stories traced Pythagoras’ family’s lineage to Ankaios himself.

Today, more than thirty centuries after Samos was pioneer territory, archaeologists are able to put dates to the stories. They agree that the ancient history of Samos was largely consistent with legend. Ionians from Epidauria arrived in the late second millennium B.C., and the Pythian oracle at Delphi was busy in operation then, though Apollo was not yet associated with it. The colonists who came, perhaps led by Ankaios, were part of large migrations from mainland Greece to the islands of the eastern Aegean and the shores of Asia Minor.

Archaeologists have also discovered that these Ionian settlers were not the first to set foot on Samos, which accords with another legend – that many of the Mycenaeans who besieged Troy and sent the great wooden horse into the doomed city settled on the Turkish coast and nearby islands. Excavations show that there were people living on Samos more than a thousand years before the Ionian settlers, and some were probably Mycenaean. Any who arrived after the Trojan War were actually relative latecomers.

Perhaps it helped smooth relations between that earlier population and the new Ionian colonists that the newcomers immediately recognised the prehistoric fertility ‘Mother Goddess’ of Samos as the goddess they already knew and worshipped as Hera. So strong was the conviction that this was Hera, that a site sacred to the Mother Goddess, on the banks of the Samian river Imbrasos, was identified as Hera’s birthplace. A wicker bush there was believed to have sheltered her birth. By the time Pythagoras was born, what for millennia had been a plain stone altar and a simple structure protecting a wooden effigy and a wicker bush had become one of the most magnificent temple complexes in the world. The great temple of Artemis at Ephesus, nearby across the Strait of Samos, did not quite succeed in copying its splendour.

Before the second millennium B.C. ended, another wave of settlers, this one led by a man named Prokles, from Pityous, disembarked on the beaches of Samos and seized control of the island. Prokles’ people ruled for about four hundred years, until the eighth century B.C. Then the descendants of the earlier settlers turned the tables. These wealthy landowners called themselves Geomoroi, or ‘those who shared out the land’. The period of their dominance was the ‘geometric’ period, a term that applied not only on Samos but to a phase of history in the surrounding Greek areas as well.5The word ‘geometry’ came from the way the Geomoroi ‘geometrically’ divided up their land. Pythagoras’ ancestors, at least on his mother’s side, were among them.

The centuries of Geomoroi rule were an era of increasing prosperity for Samos, and also the time when the richest cultural interchange occurred between her and the peoples of Egypt and the Near East. Her location near the west coast of present-day Turkey placed Samos at the crossroads of the great sea-trading routes that linked the Black Sea with Egypt, and Italy and mainland Greece with the Orient. The mainland coast across the narrow Strait of Samos was the western terminus of overland trading routes that brought caravans bearing exotic goods from the East. Samos became a hub for ships that travelled all over the known world. Her sailors took larger, innovative new vessels, designed and constructed by Samian shipbuilders, beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, perhaps even to southern England. The semi-mythical Kolaios reputedly made that voyage and donated a tithe of his profits to Hera’s temple. Samos controlled fertile areas across the strait on the mainland, ensuring an ample grain supply. By the sixth century B.C., when Pythagoras was born, she was founding colonies in Minoa, Thrace, and Cilicia. Samian expatriates were living in Egypt, bolstering trade relations with the pharaohs.

Though the island’s prosperity continued to soar, the era of Geomoroi rule had ended by the time Pythagoras was born. In the late seventh century B.C., the aristocratic Geomoroi had succumbed to a tyrannical regime. The takeover reputedly occurred while most citizens were outside the city at the temple, enjoying a festival of the goddess.

Pythagoras was born in about 570 B.C., or perhaps a little earlier. Kolaios would have returned at about that time from his heroic voyage. Though the Geomoroi had lost control of the island, Samos’ climb towards her economic and cultural zenith continued. This was her golden age. For Pythagoras’ mother’s Geomoroi family, the ascent of the tyranny must have been a serious blow in terms of power and perhaps wealth. However, Mnesarchus was a merchant whose commercial situation would have improved rather than suffered in the upheaval. Theirs was surely a fortuitous marriage, with Parthenis bringing her family’s ancient aristocratic heritage and lands, and Mnesarchus bringing a newer fortune earned in the thriving Samian mercantile empire.

Mnenarchus’ profession makes it likely that Pythagoras did not spend his entire childhood and youth on Samos. According to the historian Neanthes (one of the most reliable sources used by the three biographers), he travelled to Tyre and Italy and elsewhere with his father. Also according to Neanthes, and others as well, he had two older brothers, Eunostus and Tyrrhenus, and perhaps a foster brother to share these adventures. If the story is correct that Pythagoras’ father was not only a merchant but also a gem engraver, then his sons would have been trained in that craft. Iamblichus was sure that Pythagoras had the best possible schooling and studied with learned men on Samos and even in Syria, especially with ‘those who were experts in divinity’. It is plausible that the family continued to have trading or personal connections with the area around Sidon, in Syria, where Iamblichus’ biography said Pythagoras was born.

Describing Pythagoras as a youth, Iamblichus strayed into the overblown adulation that he would adopt in later chapters of his book, but a more realistic picture emerges of a young man gifted with a natural grace and manner of speech and behaviour that made a good impression even on people much older than himself. Iamblichus wrote that he was serene, thoughtful, and without eccentricity. Statues in Samos’ museums –kouroi, dating from that period – suggest that this was the ideal: a human youth, but hinting at something more centred, mysterious, and holy.

On Samos, Pythagoras was at the epicentre of the commercial world, but not at the epicentre of Greek science and natural philosophy. He was, however, only a narrow strait away from Miletus, where Thales, called ‘the first to introduce the study of nature to the Greeks’, had his headquarters. About fifteen years before Pythagoras’ birth, Thales observed and recorded an eclipse. That event has been taken to mark, or at least to symbolise, the beginning of Greek science and natural philosophy, and, because Thales’ observation was an eclipse, it is possible to identify the date: May 28, 585 B.C.

Little is known about Thales except that he studied nature and astronomy and, unsatisfied with mythological explanations, pondered questions about how the world began and what was there before anything else. Plato, in his dialogueTheaetetus,used Thales as an example of a man too preoccupied with his studies:

Thales, when he was star-gazing and looking upward, fell into a well and was rallied (so it is said) by a clever and pretty maidservant from Thrace, because he was eager to know what went on in the heaven but did not notice what was in front of him, nay, at his very feet.6

Thales did have a practical side. He was famous for coming up with simple, ingenious solutions to problems that stumped others. News probably reached Samos, if the story was true (and even if it was not), that when the army of King Croesus, of fabled wealth, was brought to a standstill for lack of a bridge over the river Halys, Thales had a channel dug upstream of their position that diverted the river to the other side of the army, so that without having moved a step they found they had crossed it.7

It might be said that Thales had a special affinity for water, be it in the river or the well, for he thought that water itself was the first principle from which all other things had sprung, and that the world itself floats on water ‘like a log or something else of that sort’, as Aristotle later commented a bit dismissively. Pythagoras’ biographer Diogenes Laertius wrote that Thales lived to be so old that he ‘could no longer see the stars from the earth’. He was known as one of the ‘Seven Sages’ of early Greek history, each of whom was connected with one great saying; Thales’ was ‘Water is best.’ Would that all philosophers had been so concise.

Growing up on Samos, Pythagoras surely knew about Thales. Iamblichus thought that he made trips across the strait even in his early youth to sit at the feet of the elderly sage. Pythagoras acquired a nickname: ‘the long-haired Samian’. Apollonius the wonder-worker provided Pythagoras’ biographers with the information that Pythagoras also studied with the astronomer Anaximander, another scholar at Miletus. As was true of Thales, one date is fairly firmly associated with Anaximander: he was sixty-four years old when he died in 546. He would have been in his mid-twenties when Thales recorded the eclipse, and middle-aged to elderly by the time Pythagoras could have been his pupil.

Anaximander himself may have been a pupil of Thales, but their ideas were not alike. Anaximander used mathematics and geometry in attempts to chart the heavens and the Earth, and he drew one of the earliest maps of the world. To a young man eager to acquire cutting-edge knowledge, it would have been intriguing to learn that Anaximander rejected ideas that the Earth floated on anything or hung from anything or was supported from elsewhere in the heavens. The Earth, said Anaximander, remains motionless and in place because the universe is symmetrical and the Earth has no reason to move in one direction and not another. He introduced the notion of the ‘limitless’ or ‘unlimited’ as fundamental to all things. This idea surfaced again prominently when Pythagorean doctrine was written down by Philolaus in the next century.

For Anaximander, when the ‘unlimited’ was ‘separated’, the result was contrasts, such as male-female, even-odd, hot-cold. Contrasts were central to his creation scheme. Separation into opposites later became a major element in Pythagorean thinking. Most significantly, Anaximander believed that there was unity underlying all the contrasts, diversity, and multiplicity in the universe – an idea that would emerge much more strongly with the Pythagoreans. The parallels between Anaximander and the Pythagoreans might seem to indicate that Pythagoras must have studied with Anaximander, but Anaximander’s ideas could have reached Pythagoras or Philolaus by other routes. The young Pythagoras may also have known Anaximander’s pupil Anaximenes.

Iamblichus credited Thales with convincing Pythagoras to travel to Egypt. This kindly, modest teacher, wrote Iamblichus, apologised for his extreme old age and the ‘imbecility of his body’ and urged his talented pupil to move on, claiming that his own wisdom was in part derived from the Egyptians and that Pythagoras was even better equipped than he had been to benefit from their teaching. Thales had either visited Egypt or knew it from the accounts of others, for he wrote a description of the Nile floods (water, again) and speculated that they were caused by winds blowing from the north in the summer, which prevented the waters of the river from flowing into the Mediterranean.8Porphyry thought that what Thales and Pythagoras had most to learn from the Egyptians was geometry: ‘The ancient Egyptians excelled in geometry, the Phoenicians in numbers and proportions, and the Chaldeans in astronomical theorems, divine rites, and worship of the gods.’ ‘It is said’, Porphyry hedged, that Pythagoras learned from all of them.9

Recounting the tales and traditions about Pythagoras’ associations with Thales, Anaximander, and possibly Anaximenes on the mainland coast near Samos, and the educational odyssey he was about to undertake, Porphyry and Iamblichus resorted often to those words ‘it is said’, without revealing who said it. The stories were part of a long-standing semi-historical tradition. Unfortunately, in the centuries preceding Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Diogenes Laertius, this tradition had been embellished to the point of pollution by a spate of ‘pseudo-Pythagorean’ literature. The three historians tried to circumvent this problem by using earlier sources, but they could not, or at least did not, completely disregard some information that was probably spurious.

The tradition that Pythagoras studied with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes and even visited Egypt and Mesopotamia is not far-fetched. Samos’ position in the world geographically and economically, and what seems probable about Pythagoras’ own economic circumstances and family, make these stories credible. He had reason to feel comfortable in the wider world because of his father’s trading ventures and connections, was wealthy enough to travel and have the leisure to pursue an adventurous, eclectic self-education, and was probably insatiably curious. If Pythagoras did not make journeys like these, what could have prevented him?

Iamblichus wrote that Thales did not stop at telling Pythagoras he should go to Egypt. He warned him to be sparing of his time and careful about what he ate. Pythagoras confined himself to ‘such nutriment as was slender and easy of digestion’ so that his sleep could be short, his ‘soul vigilant and pure’, and his body in a state of ‘perfect and invariable health’. Perhaps he did follow his old teacher’s advice and succeed in maintaining this enviable conditioning, but according to Iamblichus, he did not immediately hasten to Egypt. He went by way of Sidon, probably his birthplace.

[1] The stories of the three biographers themselves are in Chapter 13.

CHAPTER 2

‘Entirely different from the institutions of the Greeks’

Sixth Century B.C.

Young Pythagoras’ journey,as Iamblichus recounted it, was the ancient equivalent of a high-risk modern junior year abroad. He bedded down in a temple on the Mediterranean coast, at the foot of Mount Carmel, a mountain associated with the prophet Elijah and his God as well as with local pagan deities. There is a much-disputed claim by the historian Josephus that Pythagoras was influenced by Jewish teaching. He could have encountered it here, although many of the Jewish population were in exile in Babylon. Iamblichus wrote that he ‘conversed with prophets’ and was initiated into the mysteries of Byblos and Tyre, not for the sake of superstition, but ‘from an anxiety that nothing might escape his observation which deserved to be learnt in the arcane or mysteries of the gods’. For a man who himself lived in a superstitious age, Iamblichus was surprisingly eager to emphasise that Pythagoras was not influenced by the ‘superstition’ of this area, though he made no such disclaimer about what Pythagoras might have picked up in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Iamblichus was writing at a time when many feared that Christianity, with roots in Jewish belief, would destroy Greek philosophy.

After a while, Pythagoras continued his journey to Egypt, and Iamblichus went into greater narrative detail than usual to relate an adventurous, delightful story. Fortuitously, or so it seemed at first, an Egyptian ship landed on the Phoenician coast near the temple where Pythagoras was living. The sailors were pleased to welcome him aboard, thinking they could sell such a comely young man at a good price. During the voyage, they changed their minds. There was something different about this modest youth from what one normally expected of a human being. The sailors reminded one another how he had appeared, descending the sacred Mount Carmel, how he had said nothing except to ask, ‘Are you bound for Egypt?’ and then had come aboard and sat silently and out of their way for two nights and three days without taking food or drink, or sleeping – at least when any of them were watching. The voyage was, furthermore, going exceptionally well, with fair weather and favourable winds. The sailors delivered Pythagoras safely to the Egyptian coast and helped him off the ship (he was weak from fasting and lack of sleep), then built an altar in front of him and heaped it with fruit. When they left, he ravenously consumed the fruit. One may take this story as evidence of his godlike nature, or as suggesting that he was a canny young traveller, giving careful attention to self-preservation.

Iamblichus’ sources indicated that in Egypt Pythagoras frequented temples, sat at the feet of priests and prophets, sought out men celebrated for their wisdom, and visited ‘any place in which he thought something more excellent might be found’, ‘astronomising and geometrising’. Isocrates, an older contemporary of Plato in the early fourth century B.C., eagerly latched on to the information that Pythagoras spent time in Egypt. Isocrates was intent on showing that the Greeks owed their learning to the Egyptians and had added very little. In his disparaging words, Pythagoras ‘went to Egypt, and having become their pupil was the first to introduce philosophy in general to Greece, and concerned himself more conspicuously than anyone else, with matters to do with sacrifices and temple purifications, thinking that even if this would gain him no advantage from the gods it would at least bring him high repute among men. And that is what happened.’ As in the tale of Pythagoras’ sagacious handling of the Egyptian sailors, here is a hint that for all his reputed purity, he was not naive but perhaps even rather opportunistic.

Egypt at the time when Pythagoras could have been there was ruled by the pharaoh Amasis II (Ahmose II), later an acquaintance of Samos’ tyrant Polykrates. It was unusual but not unprecedented for a Greek to visit Egypt. In the seventh century B.C., the pharaoh Psamtek I had hired Greek mercenaries, and in Pythagoras’ day there were Greeks living in Naukratis in the Nile delta, for Amasis was eager to promote trade with the Greek cities and even made a donation towards a rebuilding project at Delphi. However, he restricted Greek merchants to the one city and did not allow them to move around the country as much as Pythagoras is supposed to have done.

Porphyry reported a different version of Pythagoras’ Egyptian sojourn. His source wasOn Illustrious Virtuous Men, by Antiphon. By this account, Pythagoras set off with a letter of introduction from Polykrates to Amasis. This would place the journey too late, for Polykrates’ reign began in 535, shortly before Pythagoras moved to Croton. Nevertheless, Porphyry’s account is interesting: Pythagoras went first to the priests of Heliopolis, who sent him on to Memphis, saying the priests there were more ancient. These, in turn, on the same excuse, sent him to Diospolis (ancient Thebes), a journey of more than three hundred miles to the south. The priests of Diospolis had nowhere else to send him, but thought that if they made things difficult enough he would go away. They gave him ‘very hard precepts, entirely different from the institutions of the Greeks’, which he doggedly performed, winning their admiration to the extent that they taught him their secret wisdom and permitted him to sacrifice to their gods, something not normally allowed a foreigner. Pythagoras would later adopt the practice of secretiveness with respect to his own teachings, as was not common in the Greek world.

If Pythagoras did go to Egypt, what could he have learned? In the temple complexes there were ‘Houses of Life’ with many learned men copying manuscripts, large libraries, and sometimes schools. The ruling classes were literate, as we must suppose Pythagoras was, but he did not know the languages of Egypt. If the priests accepted him, as Porphyry believes they must have, then Pythagoras, though older than the schoolboys, would have had to start on an elementary level with a language, alphabet, and numbers that were foreign to him, before he could begin to understand priestly liturgy and wisdom. He would have studied the cursive hieratic script, perhaps copied out books of Egyptian literature, then advanced to hieroglyphs. He would have learned a decimal system with numbers the equivalent of 1, 10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000, but no symbol for zero. To multiply, an Egyptian added a number to itself the necessary number of times. To divide, he subtracted a number from itself until the remainder was too small to continue. Pi was unknown, but one could come close to calculating the area of a circle by measuring the diameter, subtracting 1/9, and squaring the result.

Such mathematical knowledge was for practical use: for construction or – when it came to the circle – for measuring such things as the capacity of a granary – but this was a culture whose worldview seamlessly included what was tangible physical fact and what was mythological or metaphorical, drawing no boundaries between practical and esoteric knowledge, or between everyday reality and the holy. The Egyptians’ elaborate preparations for another world after death had a practical motive: to supply what one needed to get there and live there. Magic was a high category of knowledge, as were religious ritual, myth, and medicine. Pythagoras would have studied the Egyptian hierarchy of gods and goddesses and beliefs about the afterlife, but not a doctrine of reincarnation.1He also would not have learned vegetarianism, for the upper classes ate beef and other meat fairly often.

The Egyptians had long excelled in surveying. The near perfect squareness and north–south orientation of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza is evidence of their astounding precision, and Pythagoras could not have missed seeing that pyramid if he travelled as Porphyry thought he did. It dated from about 2500 B.C., two thousand years before him. We cannot know with certainty that the Egyptians in the sixth century still had the technical genius of those distant predecessors, but surveying for land boundaries, city plans, and buildings was routine, and the older, magnificent structures that are still wonders of the world today were much fresher and much more impressive to someone who had not encountered human-made objects on this scale.

From the temple roofs, Pythagoras might have assisted with observations of the cycles of the moon and the movements of the stars and learned how these were related to the Egyptian twelve-month calendar and 365-day year. Egyptians thought their country was the centre of the cosmos and that there were definite connections between the stars and events on Earth. For example, the star Sirius (Sopdet), invisible for several months, reappeared in mid-July as a morning star, signalling the onset of the yearly inundation of the Nile and the beginning of the new year.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza with the Sphinx in the foreground

Different temples had different specialities. If Pythagoras did not move on too quickly from Heliopolis (in Porphyry’s scenario) he might have learned a creation theology that explained the diversity of nature arising from a single source, the god Atum, meaning ‘the All’. Atum existed in a state of unrealised potential not far different from the ‘unlimited’ in Anaximander’s teaching and later in Pythagorean thinking. At Memphis, where, as Porphyry told it, Pythagoras spent a little time before being sent on, he could have learned a more remarkable theology of divine creativity that provided an agent through which an idea in the mind of the creator became a physical reality. In many early cultures, a spoken or written word was understood to have creative power. In creation as viewed in Genesis, God spoke, and it was so. The theology of the priests at Memphis divided that creative ‘word’ into two different roles. A link was required, a divine intermediary between an idea in the mind of the creator and the actual physical creation. Memphis theology had arrived at a concept that would later be expressed in the opening of the Christian Gospel of John, where the Logos – Jesus, the second member of a trinity – bridges the creative gap between God and man: ‘through him [not ‘byhim’] all things were created, without him nothing was created that has been created.’ Plato’s ‘demiurge’ bridged the same gap. The god who performed that role in the theology of Memphis, Ptah, operated in similar manner on the human level, enabling an idea in a human mind (a craftsman or artist) to become a real-world product. This role or force was ‘effectiveness’ or ‘magic’. Without it you had speech or an idea or something written on a page. With it you had creative power. Pythagoras and his followers would later assign that creative role to numbers, though, by some interpretations, Pythagoreans would understand numbers to be the idea in the mind of the creator,andthe creation,andthe link between the two.

At Thebes, where Porphyry thought Pythagoras finally spent a long period and was accepted by the priests into their most secret mysteries, Egyptian theology had a monotheism close to that expressed in the Christian concept of the Trinity, but with more ‘members’. The god Amun (meaning ‘Hidden’) was the greatest among the gods – ‘unknowable’ and transcendent. The others were different manifestations of him.

Porphyry had Pythagoras returning to Samos from Thebes, but Iamblichus wrote an exciting addition to the story: Pythagoras was taken captive by ‘soldiers of Cambyses’ and brought from Egypt to Babylon. If Iamblicus was right, Pythagoras arrived there during the reign of the Chaldean dynasty, which began in 625 B.C., in the century before Pythagoras’ birth, and lasted until 539, well into his lifetime. During this period, Babylon enjoyed the second golden age in its long history – an age scholars call neo-Babylonian. However, Iamblichus’ timing, as implied by the words ‘soldiers of Cambyses’, is a problem. Cambyses I was a Persian prince in a royal line ruling in the southwestern part of present-day Iran. He was the father of Cyrus the Great, to whom Babylon would later fall, and whose empire would far exceed hers. Cambyses reigned from about 600 to 559 B.C. Pythagoras was probably only eleven years old in 559. There were frequent clashes between the Egyptians and the Babylonians, and Babylonian soldiers surely took some captives, but not until after 529 (when Pythagoras was already in southern Italy) did Cyrus the Great’s son Cambyses II conquer Egypt.

Iamblichus estimated that Pythagoras lived in Babylon for about twelve years. Any adventurous young man would have envied him this opportunity, for Babylon was a splendid, exotic, cosmopolitan city at the height of her power and wealth, far older than Samos, and far more worldly and sophisticated than Egypt. A period of supreme success and prosperity a thousand years earlier – the era of the 1894–1595 B.C. ‘Dynasty of Babylon’ and especially the reign of Hammurabi – had been one of the pinnacles of ancient civilisation. In the millennium that had passed between that period and Pythagoras’ lifetime, Mesopotamia had experienced wave after wave of migration, military clashes, and dynastic shifts, and one city after another had grappled for its moment in the Mesopotamian sun. Now it was again Babylon’s turn. If Iamblichus’ dates were near correct, Pythagoras’ visit probably caught the wake of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, when Babylon was ruled by lesser, short-lived kings of the same dynasty. Nebuchadnezzar had died in 562 B.C., when Pythagoras was about eight years old.

Pythagoras would have arrived in Babylon either by caravan across the plain or by boat on the Euphrates.2Either way, the towering seven-level ziggurat was visible long before the city came into view. Though young in comparison with the Giza pyramid (and no match for it in height – the ziggurat was about 300 feet high, the pyramid 481 feet), the ziggurat nevertheless was an exceedingly ancient monument, a relic of Babylon’s earlier golden age. Nebuchadnezzar had made sure that it was splendidly restored to connect his own reign with that former glory. The principal approach to the city from the north was an avenue sixty-six feet wide, built of giant limestone paving slabs covering a foundation of brick and asphalt. On either hand, sixty lions – fashioned of red, white, and yellow tile on the high walls – stalked the men and women on the road. At the city’s Ishtar Gate, bulls and dragons took over from the lions. This entrance was one of eight massive, bronze-armoured portals in a double-walled, moated fortification system that surrounded the city. Inside, the avenue continued and crossed the Euphrates on a bridge with supports high enough and far enough apart to allow the largest ships to pass. A temple complex housed the jewel-studded shrine of Marduk, god of the city, in a chamber lined with gold. Pythagoras and others who were not royalty or among the most elite of the priests would not have entered this chamber, but they would have known about it.