Pythagoras, (born c. 570 BCE, Samos, Ionia [Greece]—died c.

 500–490 BCE, Metapontum,
Lucanium [Italy]), Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the Pythagorean
brotherhood that, although religious in nature, formulated principles that influenced the thought
of Plato and Aristotle and contributed to the development of mathematics and Western
rational philosophy. (For a fuller treatment of Pythagoras and Pythagorean
thought, see Pythagoreanism).
Pythagoras emigrated to southern Italy about 532 BCE, apparently to escape Samos’s tyrannical
rule, and established his ethico-political academy at Croton (now Crotone, Italy). It is difficult to
distinguish Pythagoras’s teachings from those of his disciples. None of his writings have
survived, and Pythagoreans invariably supported their doctrines by indiscriminately citing their
master’s authority. Pythagoras, however, is generally credited with the theory of the functional
significance of numbers in the objective world and in music. Other discoveries often attributed to
him (the incommensurability of the side and diagonal of a square, for example, and
the Pythagorean theorem for right triangles) were probably developed only later by the
Pythagorean school. More probably, the bulk of the intellectualtradition originating with
Pythagoras himself belongs to mystical wisdom rather than to scientific scholarship.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Pythagoras must have been one of the world's greatest
persons, but he wrote nothing, and it is hard to say how much of the doctrine we know as
Pythagorean is due to the founder of the society and how much is later development. It is also
hard to say how much of what we are told about the life of Pythagoras is trustworthy; for a mass
of legend gathered around his name at an early date. Sometimes he is represented as a man of
science, and sometimes as a preacher of mystic doctrines, and we might be tempted to regard one
or other of those characters as alone historical. The truth is that there is no need to reject either of
the traditional views. The union of mathematical genius and mysticism is common enough.
Originally from Samos, Pythagoras founded at Kroton (in southern Italy) a society which was at
once a religious community and a scientific school. Such a body was bound to excite jealousy
and mistrust, and we hear of many struggles. Pythagoras himself had to flee from Kroton to
Metapontion, where he died.

It is stated that he was a disciple of Anaximander, his astronomy was the natural development of
Anaximander's. Also, the way in which the Pythagorean geometry developed also bears witness
to its descent from that of Miletos. The great problem at this date was the duplication of the
square, a problem which gave rise to the theorem of the square on the hypotenuse, commonly
known still as the Pythagorean proposition (Euclid, I. 47). If we were right in assuming that
Thales worked with the old 3:4:5 triangle, the connection is obvious.

Pythagoras argued that there are three kinds of men, just as there are three classes of strangers
who come to the Olympic Games. The lowest consists of those who come to buy and sell, and
next above them are those who come to compete. Best of all are those who simply come to look
on. Men may be classified accordingly as lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.
That seems to imply the doctrine of the tripartite soul, which is also attributed to the early
Pythagoreans on good authority, though it is common now to ascribe it to Plato. There are,
however, clear references to it before his time, and it agrees much better with the general outlook
of the Pythagoreans. The comparison of human life to a gathering like the Games was often
repeated in later days. Pythagoras also taught the doctrine of Rebirth or transmigration, which we
may have learned from the contemporary Orphics. Xenophanes made fun of him for pretending
to recognize the voice of a departed friend in the howls of a beaten dog. Empedocles seems to be
referring to him when he speaks of a man who could remember what happened ten or twenty
generations before. It was on this that the doctrine of Recollection, which plays so great a part in
Plato, was based. The things we perceive with the senses, Plato argues, remind us of things we
knew when the soul was out of the body and could perceive reality directly.

There is more difficulty about the cosmology of Pythagoras. Hardly any school ever professed
such reverence for its founder's authority as the Pythagoreans. 'The Master said so' was their
watchword. On the other hand, few schools have shown so much capacity for progress and for
adapting themselves to new conditions. Pythagoras started from the cosmical system of
Anaximenes. Aristotle tells us that the Pythagoreans represented the world as inhaling 'air' form
the boundless mass outside it, and this 'air' is identified with 'the unlimited'. When, however, we
come to the process by which things are developed out of the 'unlimited', we observe a great
change. We hear nothing more of 'separating out' or even of rarefaction and condensation.
Instead of that we have the theory that what gives form to the Unlimited is the Limit. That is the
great contribution of Pythagoras to philosophy, and we must try to understand it. Now the
function of the Limit is usually illustrated from the arts of music and medicine, and we have seen
how important these two arts were for Pythagoreans, so it is natural to infer that the key to its
meaning is to be found in them.
It may be taken as certain that Pythagoras himself discovered the numerical ratios which
determine the concordant intervals of the musical scale. Similar to musical intervals, in medicine
there are opposites, such as the hot and the cold, the wet and the dry, and it is the business of the
physician to produce a proper 'blend' of these in the human body. In a well-known passage of
Plato's Phaedo (86 b) we are told by Simmias that the Pythagoreans held the body to be strung
like an instrument to a certain pitch, hot and cold, wet and dry taking the place of high and low in
music. Musical tuning and health are alike means arising from the application of Limit to the
Unlimited. It was natural for Pythagoras to look for something of the same kind in the world at
large. Briefly stated, the doctrine of Pythagoras was that all things are numbers. In certain
fundamental cases, the early Pythagoreans represented numbers and explained their properties by
means of dots arranged in certain 'figures' or patterns.

Pythagoras, one of the most famous and controversial ancient Greek philosophers, lived from ca.
570 to ca. 490 BCE. He spent his early years on the island of Samos, off the coast of modern
Turkey. At the age of forty, however, he emigrated to the city of Croton in southern Italy and
most of his philosophical activity occurred there. Pythagoras wrote nothing, nor were there any
detailed accounts of his thought written by contemporaries. By the first centuries BCE,
moreover, it became fashionable to present Pythagoras in a largely unhistorical fashion as a
semi-divine figure, who originated all that was true in the Greek philosophical tradition,
including many of Plato's and Aristotle's mature ideas. A number of treatises were forged in the
name of Pythagoras and other Pythagoreans in order to support this view.

The Pythagorean question, then, is how to get behind this false glorification of Pythagoras in
order to determine what the historical Pythagoras actually thought and did. In order to obtain an
accurate appreciation of Pythagoras' achievement, it is important to rely on the earliest evidence
before the distortions of the later tradition arose. The popular modern image of Pythagoras is that
of a master mathematician and scientist. The early evidence shows, however, that, while
Pythagoras was famous in his own day and even 150 years later in the time of Plato and
Aristotle, it was not mathematics or science upon which his fame rested. Pythagoras was famous
(1) as an expert on the fate of the soul after death, who thought that the soul was immortal and
went through a series of reincarnations; (2) as an expert on religious ritual; (3) as a wonder-
worker who had a thigh of gold and who could be two places at the same time; (4) as the founder
of a strict way of life that emphasized dietary restrictions, religious ritual and rigorous self
discipline.

It remains controversial whether he also engaged in the rational cosmology that is typical of the
Presocratic philosopher/scientists and whether he was in any sense a mathematician. The early
evidence suggests, however, that Pythagoras presented a cosmos that was structured according to
moral principles and significant numerical relationships and may have been akin to conceptions
of the cosmos found in Platonic myths, such as those at the end of the Phaedo and Republic. In
such a cosmos, the planets were seen as instruments of divine vengeance (“the hounds of
Persephone”), the sun and moon are the isles of the blessed where we may go, if we live a good
life, while thunder functioned to frighten the souls being punished in Tartarus. The heavenly
bodies also appear to have moved in accordance with the mathematical ratios that govern the
concordant musical intervals in order to produce a music of the heavens, which in the later
tradition developed into “the harmony of the spheres.” It is doubtful that Pythagoras himself
thought in terms of spheres, and the mathematics of the movements of the heavens was not
worked out in detail. There is evidence that he valued relationships between numbers such as
those embodied in the so-called Pythagorean theorem, though it is not likely that he proved the
theorem. In recent scholarship this consensus view has received strong challenges, which will be
discussed below.
Pythagoras' cosmos was developed in a more scientific and mathematical direction by his
successors in the Pythagorean tradition, Philolaus and Archytas. Pythagoras succeeded in
promulgating a new more optimistic view of the fate of the soul after death and in founding a
way of life that was attractive for its rigor and discipline and that drew to him numerous devoted
followers.