of Polykrates (532 B.C.).[1] This date cannot be far wrong; for Herakleitos already speaks of him in the past tense.[2]
The extensive travels attributed to Pythagoras by late writers are, of course, apocryphal. Even the statement that he visited Egypt, though far from improbable if we consider the close relations between Polykrates of Samos and Amasis, rests on no sufficient authority.[3] Herodotos, it is true, observes that the Egyptians agreed in certain practices with the rules called Orphic and Bacchic, which are really Egyptian, and with the Pythagoreans;[4] but this does not imply that the Pythagoreans derived these directly from Egypt. He says also that the belief in transmigration came from Egypt, though certain Greeks, both at an earlier and a later date, had passed it off as their own. He refuses, however, to give their names, so he can hardly be referring to Pythagoras.[5] Nor does it matter; for the Egyptians
- ↑ Eratosthenes wrongly identified Pythagoras with the Olympic victor of Ol. XLVIII 1 (588/7 B.C.), but Apollodoros gave his floruit as 532/1, the era of Polykrates. He doubtless based this on the statement of Aristoxenos quoted by Porphyry (V. Pyth. 9), that Pythagoras left Samos from dislike to the tyranny of Polykrates (R. P. 53 a).
- ↑ Herakl. fr. 16, 17 (R. P. 31, 31 a).
- ↑ It occurs first in the Bousiris of Isokrates, § 28 (R. P. 52).
- ↑ Herod. ii. 81 (R. P. 52 a). The comma at Αἰγυπτίοισι is clearly right. Herodotos believed that the cult of Dionysos was introduced by Melampous (ii. 49), and he means that the Orphics got these practices from the worshippers of Bakchos, while the Pythagoreans got them from the Orphics.
- ↑ Herod. ii. 123 (R. P. ib.). The words "whose names I know, but do not write" cannot refer to Pythagoras; for it is only of contemporaries Herodotos speaks in this way (Cf. i. 51, iv. 48). Stein's suggestion that he meant Empedokles seems convincing. Herodotos must have met him at Thourioi. If Herodotos had ever heard of Pythagoras visiting Egypt, he would surely have said so in one or other of these passages. There was no occasion for reserve, as Pythagoras must have died before Herodotos was born.
the islands which the Athenians occupied after expelling the Tyrrhenians (Diog. viii. 1). This suggests Lemnos or Imbros, from which the Tyrrhenian "Pelasgians" were expelled by Miltiades (Herod. vi. 140). That explains the story that he was an Etrurian or a Tyrian. Other accounts bring him into connexion with Phleious, but that may be a pious invention of the society which flourished there at the beginning of the fourth century B.C. Pausanias (ii. 13, 1) gives it as a Phleiasian tradition that Hippasos, the great-grandfather of Pythagoras, had emigrated from Phleious to Samos.
