Pythagoras

The teaching

Taught from what Aristotle and the later lives by Porphyry and Iamblichus record of his teaching.

The soul that passes

The soul, Pythagoras teaches, is immortal. It does not end with the body but passes into other living things, human and animal. What has happened comes round again in its turn, so that nothing is wholly new, and everything born with life in it is kin to everything else. The lives give these four as the best known of all his teachings, and the whole way of life his followers kept rests on them.

His school told that he remembered his own earlier lives. Once, when he was Aethalides, Hermes offered him any gift but deathlessness, and he asked to keep his memory through life and through death; so he could recall being Euphorbus, who fought at Troy, and the lives that came after. The memory is the point of the story: a soul that has been made clean keeps the thread of its lives, and the life of the brotherhood was a cleansing of the soul for the lives to come.

All that lives is kin

Because souls pass between bodies, he forbids killing the creatures that do no harm, and his followers kept from flesh and from blood sacrifice. At Delos, Aristotle reports, he would worship only at the altar of Apollo the Begetter, where nothing but wheat, barley and cakes was laid and no victim was ever slain. The sources differ on how strict the rule was: the later lives make it strict, while Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, says he refused only the ploughing ox and the ram. The rule against beans is the most famous of all, and the old writers already argued over its reason.

Number, the wisest thing

Asked what is wisest, his followers answered number, and after it the one who gave things their names; asked what is most beautiful, harmony. That all things are made of number or are like numbers, that its elements are the odd and the even, and that the tetractys of one, two, three and four holds the ratios of the octave, the fifth and the fourth, is taught in full on the page of Pythagoras and number, under Sacred geometry.

What belongs to him is the hearing of it. He is said to have been the first to call the whole order of the heavens a kosmos, an arrangement both ordered and fitting. The stars and planets, his school teaches, move at speeds that stand in the ratios of the musical intervals, and so their motion makes a harmony. We do not hear it because it has sounded since our birth, as a smith stops hearing his own hammers. The lives say that Pythagoras alone could hear it, and that he made music for his pupils in its likeness.

Music for the soul

Music, he teaches, cleanses the soul as medicine cleanses the body, and the school called this cleansing katharsis. In the morning they sang to the lyre to wake the mind from sleep and make it clear for the day. In the evening they sang to quiet the disturbances of the day and to prepare for calm sleep and good dreams. There were melodies against grief, against anger and against desire, and he preferred the lyre to the pipe, whose sound he judged too exciting for settled and free minds.

Of medicine itself his followers valued regimen most: food, exercise and rest each in its measure, with poultices before drugs, and the knife and the cautery last of all. The care of the body and the care of the soul were one discipline.

Silence and the test of entry

No one came in at once. A candidate was watched: how he laughed, how he spoke and kept silent, how he walked, what he desired, and his nature was read from his face and bearing. If he was accepted, he was left for a time to show whether he was steady, and then kept silence for five years, hearing the master's voice from behind a curtain without seeing his face. His goods went into the common store. Those who failed were sent away with twice what they had brought, and the brotherhood raised a tomb for them as for the dead.

The silence was a training, not a punishment. To master the tongue, he holds, is the hardest of all self-mastery, and whoever can hold his speech can hold the rest. Two kinds of follower came out of it: the hearers, who kept the sayings and the rule, and the learners, who were taught the reasons behind them. Among both, one phrase ended a dispute: he himself said it.

The sayings

The sayings the hearers kept are of three kinds: what a thing is, what is most so, and what must be done or left undone. What are the islands of the blessed? The sun and the moon. What is the oracle at Delphi? The tetractys, which is the harmony in which the Sirens sing. What is strongest? Judgement. What is best? Happiness.

The rules of conduct were riddles, and the later lives give their meaning. Do not stir the fire with a knife: do not provoke an angry man with sharp words. Do not step over the balance: do not go beyond what is just. Do not sit on the grain measure: do not live idly on the day's ration, but take thought for tomorrow. Do not eat the heart: do not wear away the soul with grief. Leaving home, do not turn back at the border: leaving this life, do not cling to it.

Friendship and measure

Among friends, he teaches, all things are common, and friendship is equality. His followers spoke of a friendship of all with all: of gods with men through piety, of the soul with the body, of reason with the unreasoning parts of the soul through philosophy, of citizens through good law, of husband, wife and kin through a shared life, and of the body with itself through health. Damon and Phintias, two of the brotherhood, are its proof in the tale. When the tyrant of Syracuse condemned one, the other stood surety for his life; the condemned man came back at the hour appointed, and the tyrant asked in vain to be taken into their friendship as a third.

Measure runs through all of it. With every means, the saying goes, cut away sickness from the body, ignorance from the soul, luxury from the belly, faction from the city, discord from the home, and from all things excess.

The ordered day

The day itself was a discipline. The members walked alone in the morning in quiet places, groves and temples, to set the soul in order before meeting anyone; then they met to learn and talk, trained the body, and ate a light meal at noon. The afternoon went to the city's business and to guests. In the evening they walked in twos and threes, going over what they had learned, then bathed and ate together before sunset, with offerings and a reading. The day closed with the eldest's precepts: harm no cultivated plant and no creature that does not harm humankind, speak with reverence of gods, daimons and heroes, of parents and benefactors, and stand by the law against lawlessness.

Memory was trained with the day. A follower did not rise from bed before he had recalled what he had said, heard and done the day before, in order, and then the day before that; and at night he went over the day's deeds before he slept. That nightly review, as the Golden Verses of the school give it, is taught on the page of The evening review, under Meditation.