Greek Week: Who Was Pythagoras?

Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos in 580 BCE. At the age of fifty, he left the island and settled in southern Italy. He formed a religious community known as the Pythagoreans, who were a pious and moral people living by strict rules governing every aspect of life. He believed in the process of transmigration. The soul was eternal and recycled, thus it entered another human, animal, or even a plant . There was great order in what Pythagoras believed and studied. He posited that the universe is organized by diabolically opposing pairs like odd and even, good and evil, day and night, statics and dynamics, and even male and female. In the case of male and female, however, the female principle (matter) is evil, whereas the male principle (form) is good .

A. N. Whitehead has described Pythagoras as “the first theorist to look at the function of mathematical ideas in abstract thought. Pythagoras focused on the generalities in reasoning, and he divined the importance of numbers as an aid to the conditions involved in the order of nature” . Pythagoras also believed that the essence of the universe could be found in music. He experimented with the lyre and noticed that different string lengths resulted in different pitches of sound. Additionally, he was deeply influenced by the Pythagorean’ principle of justice, which they regarded as the basis of all virtue.