Pythagoras
c. 570 BCE–c. 495 BCE · Samos
Religious and philosophical teacher from Samos who founded the Pythagorean brotherhood at Croton. His teachings joined the transmigration of souls and dietary askesis to a fascination with number; his followers made arithmetic, geometry and harmonics central, though how much of that mathematics was his own is disputed among scholars. Influenced Plato and Western mysticism.
“The Pythagoreans held that "all things are number" (or "number is the substance of all things").”
Did you know?
Pythagoras and Confucius were contemporaries
Pythagoras in the Greek world and Confucius in China were alive at the same time for roughly half a century — with no record that either ever knew the other existed. Two of history's most influential teachers, on opposite ends of Eurasia, belonged to the very same generation.
How we know
Pythagoras c. 570–495 BCE; Confucius 551–479 BCE. Their lives overlap 551–495 BCE = 56 years.
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Samos
What they did here
Born on the Aegean island of Samos c. 570 BCE. He left c. 530, when the tyranny of Polycrates (in power from c. 535) became unbearable (Aristoxenus, via Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 9).
About Samos
A powerful Ionian island once ruled by the tyrant Polycrates—birthplace of Pythagoras, home of the Eleatic monist Melissus, and the island whose son Aristarchus first dared to set the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the cosmos.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Pythagoras’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.