Figure
c. 570 – 495 BCE
Pythagoras of Samos left no writings, and the line between the historical man and the legend his followers wove around him cannot be drawn with confidence. Around 530 BCE he emigrated to Croton, a Greek city in southern Italy, where he founded a religious and philosophical brotherhood that bound its members by strict rules of diet, dress, silence, and shared property. Wonderful tales gathered about him — that he had a golden thigh, recalled his former lives, and could be in two places at once — and later Pythagoreans attributed their own doctrines to the master as a matter of piety, sealing them with the phrase 'he himself said it'.
The first great teaching of the school is that number is the principle of all things — that the cosmos is ordered by ratio and proportion. The decisive discovery was that the concordant intervals of music correspond to simple whole-number ratios of string lengths, so that harmony, the most beautiful thing the ear knows, is at bottom arithmetic. From this the Pythagoreans extended the idea of order-as-harmony to the heavens, imagining a 'music of the spheres', and derived the world from the opposition of limit and the unlimited (compare the Indefinite Dyad).
The second great teaching is the transmigration of souls: the soul is immortal and is reborn through a succession of bodies, human and animal. From this followed the brotherhood's reverence for life and its dietary restrictions. Philosophy, on this view, is a way of purifying the soul and freeing it from the cycle of rebirth.
Through Plato, whose Timaeus and doctrine of the soul are deeply Pythagorean, the tradition entered the mainstream of Greek thought. It revived in the Neopythagoreanism of Numenius and others, and Iamblichus later wrote a life of Pythagoras that made him the fountainhead of all true philosophy, the figure in whom Greek wisdom and ancient revelation meet.
PLATO SCROLL