Introduction

It is not easy to discover the truth about Pythagoras or the early Pythagoreans. In this chapter, I draw on a variety of evidence about the political life of the period, and the Pythagoreans’ involvement in it, some from authors concerned with the Pythagorean heritage, and some from historians interested more generally in the cities of southern Italy. I then add my own speculative reasoning, and a critique of the speculations of others. My aim is to give the reader some sense of the historical context, the problems involved in reconstructing the story, and plentiful references to the primary texts where what counts as evidence can be found.

Pythagoras in Samos, Delos and Delphi

All our sources attribute Pythagoras’ political activity to his period in Croton. For the period before his emigration from Samos, the ancient biographers (citing various earlier sources, mostly of dubious quality) mention his birth, parentage, upbringing, higher education and research travels (to Egypt and Babylon, among other places). We hear that he left Samos, aged about forty, because Polycrates’ dictatorship had rendered Samos inhospitable for a free and philosophically inclined person.