Introduction

More even perhaps than Heraclitus – for whom we have at least a few well-attested original statements – Pythagoras eludes interpretation. How can we distinguish reliable from unreliable testimonies? Are there any fully trustworthy sources in the first place? Some scholars place their faith in the earliest, pre-Platonic, evidence, but how that is to be taken has been interpreted very differently. The evidence for Pythagoras in Aristotle's lost work on the Pythagoreans is problematic, and what he has to say about him in the extant treatises amounts to very little. Twentieth-century scholarship was very dismissive of the far richer accounts of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans in much later Neopythagorean or Neoplatonic writers who were accused, with some justification, of inventing a picture of Pythagoras who could be cited as authority for their own fantastic doctrines. Yet without a clear basis on which to judge how fantastic Pythagoras’ own teachings may have been, it is obviously difficult to decide how far later sources may have distorted them. When every ancient and every modern interpretation suffers from large doses of the speculative, the desperate conclusion seems to loom – that the real Pythagoras is now more or less totally inaccessible.

A recurrent problem relates to the use of modern categories, even when some of these have ancient precursors. Should Pythagoras be considered a mystic, a sage, a religious leader, a charismatic figure, a guru, a magus or magician, a wonder-worker, a shaman, a philosopher, a cosmologist, a mathematician, a scientist? The scholarly literature is full of attempts to shoehorn him into one or other, or more often into a combination of such categories. We shall find reason to be cautious about the usefulness of all of these labels.