PICTAGORAS, PITHAGORES. Pythagoras, c. 582-500 B.C., was the son of a gem engraver, Mnesarchus of Samos. He emigrated to Kroton c. 531 B.C. and there founded an order, later known as the Pythagoreans, devoted to Apollo the Giver of Life, a cult forbidding the use of fire or of animal victims. Pythagoras believed in metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls (Met XV.60-487; OM XV.211-1228). He requested his disciples to refrain from meat and the flesh of animals, mullets, eggs or egg-sprung animals, and beans. He is credited with the discovery of the principal intervals of the musical scale and with the interpretation of the world as a whole through number. His three treatises are On Education, On Statesmanship, and On Nature. One story of his death involves the commandment against eating beans. His enemies set fire to his house, and as Pythagoras fled, he found himself in a field of beans. Rather than trample them, he allowed his pursuers to slay him (Diogenes Laertius VIII.l).
The Man in Black says that if he knew all the problems or "jeupardyes" of chess that Pithagoras knew, he would have played the game against Fortune better, BD 665-669. He says that Tubal made the first songs, but the Greeks say Pictagoras did so, BD 1160-1170, Aurora says so, a reference to Peter Riga's Aurora, Liber Genesis 481-484. Isidore makes this statement in Etymologiae III.16, and it appears in Peter Comestor's Historia scholastica XVII.xxv (PL 198: 1078-1079). Boethius reminds Lady Philosophy that she has always told him of Pictagoras's comment that men shall serve God and not gods, Bo I, Prosa 4. 258-262 [Boece: Peter1 Riga]
Pictagoras occurs in final rhyming position, BD 1167, and in Bo I, Prosa 4.260. Pithagores appears in final rhyming position, BD 667.