The Music of Pythagoras Read Online Free Page A

army, so that without having moved a step they found they had crossed it. 7
    It might be said that Thales had a special affinity for water, be it in the river or the well, for he thought that water itself was the first principle from which all other things had sprung, and that the world itself floats on water “like a log or something else of that sort,” as Aristotle later commented a bit dismissively. Pythagoras’ biographer Diogenes Laertius wrote that Thales lived to be so old that he “could no longer see the stars from the earth.” He was known as one of the “Seven Sages” of early Greek history, each of whom was connected with one great saying; Thales’ was “Water is best.” Would that all philosophers had been so concise.
    Growing up on Samos, Pythagoras surely knew about Thales. Iamblichus thought that he made trips across the strait even in his early youth to sit at the feet of the elderly sage. Pythagoras acquired a nickname: “the long-haired Samian.” Apollonius the wonder-worker provided Pythagoras’ biographers with the information that Pythagoras alsostudied with the astronomer Anaximander, another scholar at Miletus. As was true of Thales, one date is fairly firmly associated with Anaximander: he was sixty-four years old when he died in 546. He would have been in his mid-twenties when Thales recorded the eclipse, and middle-aged to elderly by the time Pythagoras could have been his pupil.
    Anaximander himself may have been a pupil of Thales, but their ideas were not alike. Anaximander used mathematics and geometry in attempts to chart the heavens and the Earth, and he drew one of the earliest maps of the world. To a young man eager to acquire cutting-edge knowledge, it would have been intriguing to learn that Anaximander rejected ideas that the Earth floated on anything or hung from anything or was supported from elsewhere in the heavens. The Earth, said Anaximander, remains motionless and in place because the universe is symmetrical and the Earth has no reason to move in one direction and not another. He introduced the notion of the “limitless” or “unlimited” as fundamental to all things. This idea surfaced again prominently when Pythagorean doctrine was written down by Philolaus in the next century.
    For Anaximander, when the “unlimited” was “separated,” the result was contrasts, such as male-female, even-odd, hot-cold. Contrasts were central to his creation scheme. Separation into opposites later became a major element in Pythagorean thinking. Most significantly, Anaximander believed that there was unity underlying all the contrasts, diversity, and multiplicity in the universe—an idea that would emerge much more strongly with the Pythagoreans. The parallels between Anaximander and the Pythagoreans might seem to indicate that Pythagoras must have studied with Anaximander, but Anaximander’s ideas could have reached Pythagoras or Philolaus by other routes. The young Pythagoras may also have known Anaximander’s pupil Anaximenes.
    Iamblichus credited Thales with convincing Pythagoras to travel to Egypt. This kindly, modest teacher, wrote Iamblichus, apologized for his extreme old age and the “imbecility of his body” and urged his talented pupil to move on, claiming that his own wisdom was in part derived from the Egyptians and that Pythagoras was even better equipped than he had been to benefit from their teaching. Thales had either visited Egypt or knew it from the accounts of others, for he wrote a description of the Nile floods (water, again) and speculated that they werecaused by winds blowing from the north in the summer, which prevented the waters of the river from flowing into the Mediterranean. 8 Porphyry thought that what Thales and Pythagoras had most to learn from the Egyptians was geometry: “The ancient Egyptians excelled in geometry, the Phoenicians in numbers and proportions, and the Chaldeans in astronomical theorems, divine rites, and worship of the