The One Where We Learn Not To Pee Towards The Sun

To be frank, I found most of the content about Pythagoras to be exceptionally ho-hum. Something something numbers something something transitive souls. However, I did find something supremely thought provoking in the fact that Pythagoras wrote basically nothing himself and almost everything we know about what he said and believed is second-hand.

This got me thinking about historical narratives of figures whose legacies were made by others. Pythagoras’ teachings were largely spread by the groups, the mathematikoi and akousmatikoi, that came together after his death and then other philosophers after that, like Aristotle and Plato. This seems like a game of telephone, in which one’s original message gets lost and morphed in translation, except over generations and distances. So in reality it seems widely accepted that there are a great deal of things attributed to Pythagoras that are actually just a product of misattribution and projection. As the Stanford web article points out, the fact that none of these sources are contemporary and most contradict each other doesn’t help matters either. In the study of ancient and classical history, this is so very confounding. This is a case study in how unreliable sources can be. One must take classical sources, even champs like Herodotus or Aristotle, with a healthy dose of incredulity. Writers using the unreliable narrator trope before it was even cool.