Pythagoras Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Did Pythagoras Study Philosophy in Egypt?

Pythagoras of Samos (lived c. 570 – 495 BCE) is undoubtedly among the most famous of all ancient Greek philosophers. Unfortunately, extremely little can be said about him historically with any degree of certainty. As far as we know, Pythagoras never wrote anything himself and the only contemporary references to him come from the meagre fragments that have survived from the originally much more voluminous writings of his contemporaries. These sources are enough to establish that he was almost certainly a real person, but his life is almost completely obscure.

The later sources about Pythagoras that provide most of our information about him are filled with all kinds of unreliable legends. As I discuss in this article from March 2018, although most people today believe that Pythagoras was a mathematician, the earliest sources about his life actually portray him as more of a mystic sage. It’s only in later sources that he starts to be portrayed as having done anything involving math. The theorem that now bears his name isn’t even attributed to him in any written source until many centuries after his death.

In this article, I want to talk about one of the most famous stories about Pythagoras’s life: the story that he travelled to Egypt, learned about religion and philosophy from the Egyptian priests, and then introduced Egyptian religious ideas to the Greeks. This is a story that is attested in some ancient sources and that has become very prominent in popular discourse about Pythagoras—but is it historically correct?

Debunking the Misconception of the Flat Earth

Hardly anyone nowadays believes the earth is flat. Many people, however, wrongly believe that people during the Middle Ages thought the world was flat. In reality, however, the sphericity of the earth was common knowledge throughout the entire Middle Ages. The idea that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat is a canard invented in the Early Modern Period by authors who wanted to portray the Middle Ages as a time of backwardness and superstitious regression.

Three Bizarre Stories from Ancient Greece

Like many people, I am deeply fascinated by the obscure, the bizarre, and the perplexing. Thankfully, I happen to study the classics, which is a subject that is full of obscure, bizarre, and perplexing stories. There are so many such stories, in fact, that I cannot even count the number of them that I have read. Nonetheless, I thought I would share a few of my favorites here. Here are three stories I picked out as being among the most bizarre stories told by classical writers: a story of a dying man who allegedly stayed alive for three days by sniffing a loaf of bread, stories of a man with a golden thigh who could make rivers greet him by name, and a historical event in which an oligarchy was overthrown by conspirators disguised as prostitutes.

Did Pythagoras Discover the Pythagorean Theorem?

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos (lived c. 570 – c. 495 BC) is most famous today for having allegedly discovered the Pythagorean theorem, but, historically speaking, he did not really discover this theorem and it is even questionable whether he ever engaged in any kind of mathematics at all. The historical Pythagoras of Samos seems to have been a sort of mystic sage and spiritual guru, who lived a far more bizarre and fascinating life than you ever would have guessed from what you learned in mathematics class.

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