Pythagoreans

Use in the book

The Life offers incompatible accounts of direct instruction by Pythagoras, contact with his followers, and mediation through Telauges, Hippasus, or Brotinus. Neanthes explicitly distrusts the circulating letter attributed to Telauges. Simplicius’ notice emphasizes proximity to the Pythagoreans, but the apparatus questions whether that clause belongs to the Theophrastean source. Other witnesses make the affiliation do explanatory work: Athenaeus derives abstention from living creatures from Empedocles’ Pythagorean identity; Nicomachus places wind-aversion among powers shared by Pythagoras’ successors; Iamblichus casts musical restraint as a model of ethical discipline. The scholium on rhetoric extends a teaching genealogy back to Pythagoras. These are different forms of appropriation. They testify strongly to an enduring Pythagorean reading of Empedocles, while leaving the details of instruction and institutional connection uncertain. The stories of unauthorized publication also show that the tradition imagined a tension between restricted discourse and poetry accessible to a wider public.

Three transmission problems recur in the educational accounts. First, a direct relationship with Pythagoras is not equivalent to association with people called Pythagoreans. Second, a letter bearing Telauges’ name is a document attributed to a member of the lineage, not automatically an authentic contemporary letter. Third, the verbs for hearing, meeting, emulating, and imitating indicate different relations. Diogenes preserves those distinctions even when later summaries compress them into pupilage. A lexicon reader should therefore ask not only who supposedly taught Empedocles, but what kind of connection each witness’s word actually asserts.

The school-label also has different argumentative functions outside the teacher lists. In Athenaeus it explains a ritual substitution that maintains festival participation without sacrificing a living ox. In Nicomachus it unifies several extraordinary epithets despite the different deeds they name. In the musical story the ethical transformation of a violent youth exemplifies the power of disciplined performance. The scholium on rhetoric, by contrast, makes the designation a bridge in a genealogy of intellectual arts. None of these functions requires that the source possessed a membership register or a continuous institutional history. They reveal a flexible classificatory tradition through which Empedocles’ ethics, powers, teaching, and reputation could be made intelligible.

The poetry-publication conflict belongs within that flexibility. One report treats access to discourse as conditional and revocable; another says teachings were shared until publication changed the rules. The disagreement is itself evidence that later writers used Empedocles to think about who could possess, disclose, and perform philosophical knowledge. It cannot simply be converted into an established rule that all Pythagorean learning was always secret.

Places to read

1. A 1 §§ 53–55 (biography)2Diogenes Laertius VIII 54–55. Compiles disputed teachers, publication stories, and criticism of the Telauges letter.
2. A 7 (testimony)Simplicius, On the Physics. Calls him especially close to the Pythagoreans, with an attribution caution in the apparatus.
3. A 11–A 12 (biography)Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters. Connects Pythagorean identity with abstinence.
4. A 13–A 14 (legend)Nicomachus, on the wonders of Pythagoras. Groups extraordinary powers under a Pythagorean lineage.
5. A 15 (legend)Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras. Presents music-mediated restraint as ethical transformation.
6. A 19 (testimony)Scholiast on Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras. Uses Pythagorean identity to extend the genealogy of rhetoric.

Translation in this edition

The edition sometimes supplies a tidy formula, Parmenides for argument and Pythagoras for life. That synthesis is interpretive; no quoted witness establishes such an exclusive division of influence.