Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Dicaearchus says that Pythagoras died having taken refuge in the sanctuary of the Muses at Metapontum, having fasted for forty days. But Heraclides says in his Epitome of the Lives of Satyrus that, after burying Pherecydes in Delos, he returned to Italy and, finding a banquet held by Cylon of Croton, retired to Metapontum and ended his life there by starvation, not wishing to live any longer. Hermippus, however, says that when the Agrigentines and the Syracusans were at war, Pythagoras marched out with his companions and took command of the Agrigentines; but when a rout occurred, being forced to skirt the beanfield, he was killed by the Syracusans; and the rest, about thirty-five in number, were burned to death in Tarentum for wishing to take an active part in government against the magistrates in power.

​Hermippus also tells another tale about Pythagoras. For he says that, having arrived in Italy, he built a small subterranean chamber and instructed his mother to write down what happened on tablets, noting also the time, and then to lower them down to him until he should come back up. The mother did this. And Pythagoras, after a time, came back up lean and reduced to a skeleton; and entering the assembly, he declared that he had arrived from Hades; and indeed he read out to them the events that had occurred. Moved by what was said, they wept and wailed, and believed that Pythagoras was some divine being, so that they even entrusted their wives to him to learn some of his teachings; and these women were called Pythagorean women. Thus far Hermippus.

​Pythagoras also had a wife named Theano, daughter of Brontinus of Croton; though others say that she was the wife of Brontinus, but a disciple of Pythagoras. He had also a daughter, Damo, as Lysis says in his letter to Hippasus, speaking thus concerning Pythagoras: "Many say that you even philosophize in public, which Pythagoras deemed unworthy; he at any rate, having entrusted his memoirs to his own daughter Damo, enjoined her to give them to none of those outside the household. And though she could have sold the discourses for much money, she refused; she thought poverty and her father's injunctions more precious than gold, and that though she was a woman."

​They had also a son, Telauges, who succeeded his father and, according to some, was the teacher of Empedocles. Hippobotus at least says that Empedocles speaks thus: "Telauges, glorious son of Theano and Pythagoras." No treatise of Telauges is preserved, but some of his mother Theano's are. And they say that, when asked how many days it takes for a woman to become pure after intercourse with a man, she said: "From her own husband immediately, but from another never." And to a woman about to go to her own husband she gave counsel to lay aside her shame along with her garments, and when rising again to take it up once more along with them. When asked, "What things?" she replied, "Those by which I am called a woman."

​Pythagoras then, as Heraclides the son of Sarapion says, died at the age of eighty, according to his own scheme of the ages of life; but as the majority say, having lived ninety years. And there are playful epigrams of our own composed on him, which run thus: "Not you alone kept your hands off living things, but we do too; for who, Pythagoras, has ever touched living beings? Yet when something is boiled and roasted and salted, then it is that, having no soul, we eat it." Another: "Pythagoras was then so wise that, while he himself would not touch meat and called it unjust, he fed others. I admire the sage: he said that he himself did no wrong, yet he caused others to do wrong."