Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Another: "If you wish to understand the mind of Pythagoras, look upon the boss of the shield of Euphorbus. For he says, 'I was a mortal before'; but when he was not, claiming that he was someone, he was no one when he was." And another on his death: "Alas, alas, why did Pythagoras revere beans so much? And so he died together with his own disciples. There was a beanfield; but so that he would not trample them, he was slain at the crossroads by the Agrigentines." He flourished about the sixtieth Olympiad, and his school endured for nine or ten generations.

​For the last of the Pythagoreans, whom Aristoxenus also saw, were Xenophilus the Chalcidian from Thrace, Phanton of Phlius, and Echecrates, Diocles, and Polymnastus, themselves also from Phlius. They were hearers of Philolaus and Eurytus of Tarentum. There were also four men named Pythagoras about the same time, living not far apart from one another: one was of Croton, a man of tyrannical nature; another was of Phlius, a trainer [an anointer, as some say]; a third was of Zacynthus; the fourth was this very man, to whom they say the esoteric doctrines of philosophy belong, [the teacher of them,] from whom the proverbial 'He himself said it' came into life.

​Others say there was also another Pythagoras, a sculptor of Rhegium, who is considered to have been the first to aim at rhythm and symmetry; and another sculptor of Samos; and another, a bad orator; and another, a physician who wrote on hernia and composed certain treatises on Homer; and another who wrote a history of the Dorians, as Dionysius relates. Eratosthenes says—as Favorinus also cites in the eighth book of his Miscellaneous History—that this man (the philosopher) was the first to box scientifically at the forty-eighth Olympiad, wearing his hair long and clad in a purple robe; and that, excluded from the boys' contest and mocked, he immediately entered among the men and won.

​The epigram which Theaetetus composed also demonstrates this: "Stranger, if you remember a certain Pythagoras, long-haired Pythagoras, the famed boxer of Samos, I am that Pythagoras; and if you should ask any of the Eleans about my deeds, you will say that he speaks things beyond belief." Favorinus says that he employed definitions through mathematical material, which Socrates and his associates extended further, and after them Aristotle and the Stoics. Moreover, he was the first to name the heaven 'cosmos' and the earth 'round'; though according to Theophrastus it was Parmenides, and according to Zeno, Hesiod.

​They say that Cylon opposed him just as Antilochus opposed Socrates. Concerning the athlete Pythagoras, this epigram also used to be recited: "This Pythagoras, the son of Crates, a Samian, came to Olympia yet beardless, to box among the boys." And the philosopher wrote as follows: Pythagoras to Anaximenes. "You too, excellent friend, if you were in no way superior to Pythagoras in birth and renown, would have migrated and departed from Miletus; but now ancestral fame detains you, and it would have detained me too had I been like Anaximenes. But if you, the best men, abandon your cities, their good order will be stripped from them, and danger from the Medes will be more threatening to them.

​Nor is it always noble to discourse on the heavens, and to care for one's fatherland is nobler. And I myself am not entirely occupied with my own speculations, but am also involved in the wars which the Italiotes wage against one another." Now that we have gone through the life of Pythagoras, we must speak of the famous Pythagoreans; after whom, of those who are classified by some as isolated thinkers; then in this way we shall attach the succession of noteworthy men down to Epicurus, just as we said before. Now concerning Theano and Telauges we have already spoken; but we must speak now first of Empedocles, for according to some he was a hearer of Pythagoras.