Book 8
1.39
Pythagoras met his death in this wise.In the account which follows two passages should be distinguished: (1) συνεδρεύοντος συνέβη, and (2) οὔτω δὲ καὶ(§ 40) ἀσιτήσαντα. A similar combination of Neanthes and Dicaearchus is found in Porphyry, Vit. Pyth 55 sqq., Neanthes apparently insisting on the absence, and Dicaearchus on the presence, of the master at the time when the brotherhood were attacked and scattered. Iamblichus, Vit. Pyth. 251 sq., cites Nicomachus, whose version agrees with that of Neanthes. As he sat one day among his acquaintances at the house of Milo, it chanced that the house was set ablaze out of jealousy by one of the people who were not accounted worthy of admittance to his presence, though some say it was the work of the inhabitants of Croton anxious to safeguard themselves against the setting-up of a tyranny. Pythagoras was caught as he tried to escape; he got as far as a certain field of beans, where he stopped, saying he would be captured rather than cross it, and be killed rather than prate about his doctrines; and so his pursuers cut his throat.This passage, partly in direct (γενόμενος, ἔστη, εἰπών) and partly in reported speech (καταληφθῆναι. ἀποσφαγῆναι), receives some light from the story of Myllias and his wife Timycha as given by Iamblichus, Vit. Pyth. 189-194, on the authority of Hippobotus and Neanthes (cf. also Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. § 61, where the story of Damon and Phintias is said to have been transferred by Hippobotus and Neanthes to the same trusty pair, Myllias and Timycha). The story in Iamblichus represents a band of Pythagoreans pursued by a tyrant’s myrmidons and caught in a plain where beans were growing, all of them preferring to die where they stood rather than trample on the beans; but this story might be located anywhere. It has nothing inherently to do with the end of Pythagoras. What remains, τὸν δὲ Π. καταληφθῆναι διεξιόντα, may be compared with Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. § 57, where we are told that the disciples made a bridge of their own bodies over the fire and thus the master escaped from the burning house but, in despair at the extinction of his school, chose a voluntary dealth. The words οὕτω δέ which follow come in awkwardly, as they are separated from the sentence about the fire. So also were murdered more than half of his disciples, to the number of forty or thereabouts; but a very few escaped, including Archippus of Tarentum and Lysis, already mentioned.
