The Music of Pythagoras Read Online Free

occurred while most citizens were outside the city at the temple, enjoying a festival of the goddess.
    Pythagoras was born in about 570 B.C ., or perhaps a little earlier. Kolaios would have returned at about that time from his heroic voyage.Though the Geomoroi had lost control of the island, Samos’ climb toward her economic and cultural zenith continued. This was her golden age. For Pythagoras’ mother’s Geomoroi family, the ascent of the tyranny must have been a serious blow in terms of power and perhaps wealth. However, Mnesarchus was a merchant whose commercial situation would have improved rather than suffered in the upheaval. Theirs was surely a fortuitous marriage, with Parthenis bringing her family’s ancient aristocratic heritage and lands, and Mnesarchus bringing a newer fortune earned in the thriving Samian mercantile empire.
    Mnenarchus’ profession makes it likely that Pythagoras did not spend his entire childhood and youth on Samos. According to the historian Neanthes (one of the most reliable sources used by the three biographers), he traveled to Tyre and Italy and elsewhere with his father. Also according to Neanthes, and others as well, he had two older brothers, Eunostus and Tyrrhenus, and perhaps a foster brother to share these adventures. If the story is correct that Pythagoras’ father was not only a merchant but also a gem engraver, then his sons would have been trained in that craft. Iamblichus was sure that Pythagoras had the best possible schooling and studied with learned men on Samos and even in Syria, especially with “those who were experts in divinity.” It is plausible that the family continued to have trading or personal connections with the area around Sidon, in Syria, where Iamblichus’ biography said Pythagoras was born.
    Describing Pythagoras as a youth, Iamblichus strayed into the over-blown adulation that he would adopt in later chapters of his book, but a more realistic picture emerges of a young man gifted with a natural grace and manner of speech and behavior that made a good impression even on people much older than himself. Iamblichus wrote that he was serene, thoughtful, and without eccentricity. Statues in Samos’ museums—
kouroi
, dating from that period—suggest that this was the ideal: a human youth, but hinting at something more centered, mysterious, and holy.
    On Samos, Pythagoras was at the epicenter of the commercial world, but not at the epicenter of Greek science and natural philosophy. He was, however, only a narrow strait away from Miletus, where Thales, called “the first to introduce the study of nature to the Greeks,” had his headquarters. About fifteen years before Pythagoras’ birth, Thales observed and recorded an eclipse. That event has been taken to mark, orat least to symbolize, the beginning of Greek science and natural philosophy, and, because Thales’ observation was an eclipse, it is possible to identify the date: May 28, 585 B.C .
    Little is known about Thales except that he studied nature and astronomy and, unsatisfied with mythological explanations, pondered questions about how the world began and what was there before anything else. Plato, in his dialogue
Theaetetus
, used Thales as an example of a man too preoccupied with his studies:
    Thales, when he was star-gazing and looking upward, fell into a well and was rallied (so it is said) by a clever and pretty maid-servant from Thrace, because he was eager to know what went on in the heaven but did not notice what was in front of him, nay, at his very feet. 6
    Thales did have a practical side. He was famous for coming up with simple, ingenious solutions to problems that stumped others. News probably reached Samos, if the story was true (and even if it was not), that when the army of King Croesus, of fabled wealth, was brought to a standstill for lack of a bridge over the river Halys, Thales had a channel dug upstream of their position that diverted the river to the other side of the