Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/409

 PYTHAGORAS. 391 BOH of an opulent merchant named Mnesarchus, or, according to some of his later and more fervent admirers, of Apollo ; born, as far as we can make out, about the 50th Olympiad, or 580 B.C. On the many marvels recounted respecting his youth, it is unnecessary to dwell. Among them may be numbered his wide- reaching travels, said to have been prolonged for nearly thirty years, to visit the Arabians, the Syrians, the Phenicians, thu Chaldaeans, the Indians, and the Gallic Druids. But there is reason to believe that he really visited Egypt 1 perhaps also Phenicia and Babylon, then Chaldaean and independent. At the time when he saw Egypt, between 500-540 B.C., about one century earlier than Herodotus, it was under Amasis, the last of its own kings, with its peculiar native character yet unimpaired by foreign conquest, and only slightly modified by the admission during the preceding century of Grecian mercenary troops and traders. The spectacle of Egyptian habits, the conversation of the priests, and the initiation into various mysteries or secret rites and stories not accessible to the general public, may very naturally have impressed the mind of Pythagoras, and given him that turn for mystic observance, asceticism, and peculiarity of diet and clothing, which manifested itself from the same cause among several of his contemporaries, but which was not a com- mon phenomenon in the primitive Greek religion. Besides visiting Egypt, Pythagoras is also said to have profited by the teaching of Thales, of Anaximander, and of Pherekydes of but even this fact was differently stated by other authors, who called him a Tyrrhenian of Lemnos or Imbros (Porphyry, Vit. Pythag. c. 1-10), a Syrian, a Phliasian, etc. Cicero (De Repub. ii, 15: compare Livy, i, 18) censures the chronologi- cal blunder of those who made Pythagoras the preceptor of Numa; which certainly is a remarkable illustration how much confusion prevailed among literary men of antiquity about the dates of events even of the sixth cen- tury B. c. Ovid follows this story without hesitation : see Metamorph. XT, 60, with Burmann's note. 1 Cicero de Fin. v, 29 ; Diogen. Lae'rt. via, 3 ; Strabo, xiv, p. 638 ; Alex- ander Polyhistor ap. Cyrill. cont. Julian, iv, p. 128, ed. Spanh. For the vast reach of his supposed travels, see Porphyry, Vit. Pythag. 1 1 ; Jamblie 14, seqq. The same extensive iourneys are ascribed to Demokritus, Diogen. Lacrt U,35.