From the Beginning to Plato

CHAPTER 4
Pythagoreans and Eleatics
Edward Hussey
PYTHAGORAS AND THE EARLY PYTHAGOREANS
Pythagoras, a native of Samos, emigrated to southern Italy around 520, and seems
to have established himself in the city of Croton. There he founded a society of
people sharing his beliefs and way of life. This spread through the Greek cities
of southern Italy and Sicily, acquiring political as well as intellectual influence.
Some time after his death, the original society broke up and its continuity was
lost; yet groups of self-styled ‘Pythagoreans’ appeared repeatedly thereafter.
Palpably reliable evidence about early Pythagorean activities is so scanty that
some initial scepticism is in order about Pythagoras as a philosopher, or as a
‘natural philosopher’ in Ionian style. 1 Sporadic early reports depict Pythagoras as
primarily a magician and miracle-worker; and, on the theoretical side, a collector
and expositor in dogmatic style, rather than a creator or investigator. It is clear
that some doctrines later seen as ‘Pythagorean’ were already current, around the
same time, in the theological and cosmological poems attributed to Orpheus.
Plato barely mentions Pythagoras by name; but incorporates into some of his
myths material which is likely to be genuinely Pythagorean. After Plato,
philosophically-inspired reconstructions of Pythagoras begin to appear, in which
he is represented as the head of a regular school, promoting research into
philosophy and the mathematical sciences; or as an enlightened statesman and
instructor for political life. 2 At best, even when based on good sources, these
fourth-century accounts (which themselves survive only in later reports) are
more or less anachronistic idealizations. Still less reliance can be placed in the
great mass of later statements about Pythagoras and his followers.
Indirectly, the fact that certain later fifth-century thinkers were called
‘Pythagoreans’ (see below) gives some indication of what theoretical interests
were then attributed to Pythagoras. The cosmology of Parmenides (see below)
and the poems of Empedocles have a substratum of ideas that may be suspected
to be Pythagorean in inspiration. All in all, there is a body of general ideas,
appearing by the mid fifth century and reasonably firmly associated with
Pythagoras, which was to be influential in a programmatic way throughout the