Pythagoras at Croton

The story

A man between history and legend

Pythagoras is one of the most famous figures of antiquity, and yet we know very little about him for certain. He left no writings, and news of his life has reached us from authors who lived centuries later, who often mix fact and legend. According to tradition he was born on the island of Samos, in the eastern Aegean, at a time placed between about 580 and 570 BC. His father was called Mnesarchus. He is said to have been a pupil of various teachers, among them the philosopher Anaximander, of the school of Miletus.

The ancients told that he had travelled to Egypt and Babylon to learn the knowledge of the priests and mathematicians. Scholars today regard these journeys as traditional but unproven. Fantastic stories also circulated, such as that he was the son of the god Apollo or had miraculous gifts: they are legends, not history.

Arriving at Croton

Around 530 BC Pythagoras left Samos and moved to Italy, to Croton, a Greek city in Calabria, on the Ionian coast. Why did he leave? Some scholars, among them the philosopher Bertrand Russell, think he did so for political reasons: in Samos the tyrant Polycrates ruled, and Pythagoras did not approve of his government. At Croton, in any case, he found a suitable setting.

Here Pythagoras founded a school, which was also a community living together. The pupils committed to following rules of “purity”: they had food bans, kept silence and lived as a group. According to tradition, for a long time pupils could not even contradict the master: the formula “ipse dixit”, that is “he himself said it”, was repeated to end every discussion. Some late authors divide the followers into “akousmatikoi” and “mathematikoi”, but modern scholars are not sure this distinction is true. The school spread to the cities of Magna Graecia and remained influential until about 450 BC.

Everything is number

The central idea of the Pythagoreans, at least in tradition, was that reality was built on numbers. They thought that behind things there was a harmony, that is, an order made of numerical ratios. An example that was remembered is that of music. The story goes that Pythagoras, with a one-string instrument called a monochord, discovered that the musical intervals that sound good together correspond to simple ratios between the lengths of the strings. If you halve the string, the sound rises by an octave (ratio 1 to 2); with two thirds you get the fifth, with three quarters the fourth. Tradition, with its “is said to have”, does not let us say whether the discovery was Pythagoras' own or his followers'. But the idea is important: a phenomenon you hear with your ears can be described with mathematics.

For the Pythagoreans the universe itself was harmonious, almost musical, and this belief had a lasting influence on ancient thought.

The Pythagorean theorem

The theorem that bears his name says that in a right-angled triangle the square built on the hypotenuse (the longest side) equals the sum of the squares built on the other two sides, the legs. It is studied in middle school. Surprisingly, though, it is not clear that he discovered it: the property was already known to the Babylonians, who used it in their calculations long before. The tradition that attributes the theorem to Pythagoras appears only centuries after him, with Cicero and Plutarch and then with the philosopher Proclus. Perhaps it was the Pythagoreans who proved it with reasoning valid for any right-angled triangle, but this is not certain either.

The end of the community

The school of Croton, like other aristocratic communities in Magna Graecia, also attracted enmity. The sources tell different versions of the end of Pythagoras. According to one, a group of political opponents, the democrats, attacked the Pythagoreans and set fire to the house where they were gathered; Pythagoras is said to have taken refuge at Metapontum. According to another, he fled first to Locri and Taranto and then to Metapontum, where he died around 495 BC; according to a local tradition, near the temple of Hera (the “Tavole Palatine” are the remains of that temple). Even his death, in short, is told in ways that do not agree.

Legends have kept on growing. It was said, for example, that he had a wife, Theano, also a philosopher, and that women were found in his school too. These are traditions that over the centuries have made the figure of Pythagoras even more mysterious and fascinating.