Pythagoras and his followers

The study of numbers in the abstract begins in sixth century B.C. Greece with Pythagoras and the
Pythagoreans. Our knowledge of the life of Pythagoras is scanty, and little can be said with any certainty.
Those scraps of information that have filtered down to us come from early writers who vied with each
other in inventing fables concerning his travels, miraculous powers, and teachings. According to the best
estimates, Pythagoras was born between 580 and 569 B.C. on the Aegean island Samos. He appears to
have left Samos permanently as early as his eighteenth year to study in Phoenicia and Egypt, and he may
have extended his journeys as far eastward as Babylonia. Some none-too-trustworthy sources say that
when Egypt was conquered by the Persian king Cambyses in 525 B.C., Pythagoras was carried back to
Babylonia with the other Egyptian captives. Other authorities indicate, however, that he followed
Cambyses voluntarily. When Pythagoras reappeared after years of wandering (around the age of 50), he
sought out a favorable place for a school. Banned from his native Samos by the powerful tyrant
Polycrates, he turned westward and finally settled at Crotona, a prosperous Dorian colony in southern
Italy.
Founding a school was not unusual in the Greek world. The distinctive feature of the school of
Pythagoras was that its aims were at once political, philosophical, and religious. Formed of some 300
young aristocrats, the community had the character of a fraternity or a secret society: it was a closely
knit order in which all worldly goods were held in common. The school tried rigidly to regulate the diet
and way of life of its members and to invoke a common method of education. Pupils concentrated on
four mathemata, or subjects of study: arithmetica (arithmetic, in the sense of number theory as
opposed to calculating), harmonia (music), geometria (geometry), and astrologia (astronomy). This
fourfold division of knowledge became known in the Middle Ages as the “quadrivium,” to which was
then added the trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric—subjects connected with the use of language.
These seven liberal arts came to be looked on as the necessary and proper course of study for the
educated person.
Pythagoras divided those who attended his lectures into two grades of disciples: the acoustici (or
listeners) and the mathematici. After three years of listening in mute obedience to Pythagoras’s voice
from behind a curtain, a pupil could be initiated into the inner circle, to whose members were confided
the main doctrines of the school. Although women were forbidden by law to attend public meetings,
they were admitted to the master’s lectures. One source indicates that there were at least 28 women in
the select category of mathematici. When Pythagoras was close to 60 years old, he married one of his
pupils, Theano. She was a remarkably able mathematician who not only inspired him during the latter
years of his life but continued to promulgate his system of thought after his death. (Some contradictory
sources say that Theano was Pythagoras’s daughter; yet others, that she was only a highly gifted pupil,
never his wife.) Pythagoras followed the custom of Eastern teachers by passing along his views by word
of mouth. He seems not to have committed any of his teachings to writing. And furthermore, the
members of his community were bound not to disclose to outsiders anything taught by the master or
discovered by others in the brotherhood as a result of the master’s teaching. Legend has it that one
talkative disciple was drowned in a shipwreck as the gods’ punishment for his public boast that he had
added the dodecahedron to the set of regular solids Pythagoras had enumerated. The symbol on which
the members of the Pythagorean community swore their oaths was the “tetractys,” or holy
fourfoldness, which was supposed to stand for the four elements: fire, water, air, and earth. The
tetractys was represented geometrically by an equilateral triangle made up of 10 dots, and
arithmetically by the number 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 10.

What is tetractys?
The tetractys, or tetrad, or the tetractys of the decad is a triangular figure consisting of ten points
arranged in four rows: one, two, three, and four points in each row, which is the geometrical
representation of the fourth triangular number.

What is the purpose of Tetractys (also known as decad)?

According to Pythagoras, the Tetractys was the symbol of the musical, arithmetic and geometric ratios
upon which the universe was built. This mystical symbol was very important to the followers of
Pythagoras who believed that all numbers were sacred and holy.

According to the Greek writer and satirist Lucian (120–180), Pythagoras asked someone to count; when
he had reached 4, Pythagoras interrupted, “Do you see? What you take to be 4 is 10, a perfect triangle
and our oath.” Like other mystery cults of that time, the Pythagoreans had their strange initiations, rites,
and prohibitions. They refused, for example, to eat beans, drink wine, pick up anything that had fallen,
or stir are with an iron. They insisted, in addition to these curious taboos, on a life of virtue, especially of
friendship. From Pythagoreanism comes the story of Damon and Pythias. (Pythias, condemned to death
for plotting against the king, was given leave to arrange his affairs after Damon pledged his own life if his
friend did not return.) The ve-pointed star, or pentagram, was used as a sign whereby members of the
brotherhood could recognize one another. It is told that a Pythagorean fell ill while traveling and failed
to survive, despite the nursing of a kind-hearted innkeeper. Before dying, he drew the pentagram star
on a board and begged his host to hang it outside. Sometime later another Pythagorean, passing by,
noticed the symbol and after hearing the innkeeper’s tale, rewarded him handsomely.

The Pythagoreans fancied that the soul could leave one’s body, either temporarily or permanently, and
that it could inhabit the body of another person or animal. As a result of this doctrine of transmigration
of souls, they would eat no meat or shiest the animal slaughtered be the abode of a friend. The
Pythagoreans would not kill anything except as a gift to the gods, and they would not even wear
garments of wool, since wool is an animal product. A story is told in which Pythagoras, coming across a
small dog being thrashed, said, “Stop the beating, for in this dog lives the soul of my friend; I recognize
him by his voice.” Accounts of Pythagoras’s death do not agree. What is clear is that political ideas were
gradually added to the other doctrines, and for a time, the autocratic Pythagoreans succeeded in
dominating the local government in Crotona and the other Greek cities in southern Italy. About 500 B.C.,
there was a violent popular revolt in which the meetinghouse of the Pythagoreans was surrounded and
set a re. Only a few of those present survived. In several accounts, Pythagoras himself is said to have
perished in the inferno. Those with a sense of drama would have us believe that Pythagoras’s disciples
made a bridge over the fire with their bodies, so that the master might escape the frenzied mob. It is
said in these versions that he fled to nearby Metapontum but in the ensuing fight, having reached a field
of sacred beans, chose to die at the hands of his enemies rather than trample down the plants. With the
death of Pythagoras, many members of the school immigrated to the Greek mainland; some stayed
behind for a time but by the middle of the fourth century B.C. all had left Italy. Although the political
influence of the Pythagoreans was destroyed, they continued to exist for several centuries longer as a
philosophical and mathematica order. To the end, the dwindling band of exiles remained a secret
society, leaving no written record, and with notable self-denial, ascribing all their discoveries to the
master.

What set the Pythagoreans apart from the other sects was the philosophy that “knowledge is the
greatest purification,” and to them knowledge meant mathematics. Never before or since has
mathematics had such an essential part in life and religion as it did with the Pythagoreans. At the heart
of their scheme of things was the belief that some sort of an operative reality existed behind the
phenomena of nature, and that through the volition of this supreme architect, the universe was created
—that beneath the apparent multiplicity and confusion of the world around us there was a fundamental
simplicity and stability that reason might discover. They further theorized that everything, physical and
spiritual, had been assigned its allotted number and form, the general thesis being “Everything is
number.” (By “number” was meant a positive integer.) All this culminated in the notion that without the
help of mathematics, a rational understanding of the ruling principles at work in the universe would be
impossible. Aristotle wrote in the Metaphysics:

The Pythagoreans . . . devoted themselves to mathematics; they were the first to advance this study and
having been brought up in it they thought its principles were the principles of all things.
About Pythagoras himself, we are told by another chronicler that “he seems to have attached supreme
importance to the study of arithmetic, which he advanced and took out of the domain of commercial
utility.”

Music provided the Pythagoreans with the best instance of their principle that “number” was the cause
of everything in nature. Tradition credits Pythagoras with the discovery that notes sounded by a
vibrating string depended on the string’s length, and in particular, that a harmonious sound was
produced by plucking two equally taut strings, one twice the length of the other. In modern terms, the
interval between these two notes is an octave.

Similarly, if one string were half again the length of the other, the shorter one would give off a note,
called a “fifth,” above that emitted by the longer; whereas if one were a third longer than the other a
“fourth” would be produced—one note four tones above the other. It was concluded that the most
beautiful musical harmonies corresponded to the simplest ratios of whole numbers, namely, the ratios
2:1, 3:2, and 4:3 (the four numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 being enshrined in the famous Pythagorean tetractys,
or triangle of dots).

The Pythagorean views on astronomy could be considered an extension of this doctrine of harmonic
intervals. Pythagoras held that each of the seven known planets, among which he included the sun and
the moon, was carried around the earth on a crystal sphere of its own. Because it was surely impossible
for such gigantic spheres to whirl endlessly through space without generating any noise by their motion,
each body would have to produce a certain tone according to its distance from the center. The whole
system created a celestial harmony, which Pythagoras alone among all mortals could hear. This theory
was the basis for the idea of the “music of the spheres,” a continually recurring notion in medieval
astronomical speculation.

The Pythagorean doctrine was apparently a curious mixture of cosmic philosophy and number
mysticism, a sort of supernumerology that assigned to everything material or spiritual a definite integer.
Among the writings of the Pythagoreans, we find that 1 represented reason, because reason could
produce only one consistent body of truths; 2 stood for man and 3 for woman; 4 was the Pythagorean
symbol for justice, because it was the first number to be the product of equals; 5 was identified with
marriage, formed as it was by the union of 2 and 3; 6 was the number of creation; and so forth. All the
even numbers, after the first even number, were separable into other numbers; hence they were prolific
and were considered feminine and earthy—and somewhat less highly regarded in general. And because
the Pythagoreans were a predominantly male society, they classified the odd numbers, after the first
one, as masculine and divine.
Although these speculations about numbers as models of “things” strike us as far-fetched and fanciful
today, it must be remembered that the intellectuals of the classical Greek period were largely absorbed
in philosophy and that these same men, because they possessed intellectual interest, were the very
ones who were laying the foundations for mathematics as a system of thought. To Pythagoras and his
followers, mathematics was largely a means to an end, an end in which the human spirit was ennobled
through a mystical contemplation of the good and the beautiful. Only with the foundation of the School
of Alexandria do we enter a new phase in which mathematics is made into an intellectual exercise
pursued for its own sake, independent of its utilitarian applications.

Even though the Pythagoreans first studied numbers less for themselves than for the things they
represented, they were nonetheless led to recognize all sorts of new arithmetical properties.