Kitap 8
1.35
He held that the most beautiful figure is the sphere among solids, and the circle among plane figures. Old age may be compared to everything that is decreasing, while youth is one with increase. Health means retention of the form, disease its destruction. Of salt he said it should be brought to table to remind us of what is right; for salt preserves whatever it finds, and it arises from the purest sources, sun and sea.
1.36
This is what Alexander says that he found in the Pythagorean memoirs.Alexander is cited above (§ 24). εὑρηκέναι comes in both sections. This means that, in the Lives of Pythagoras which D. L. consulted, the extract from Alexander has displaced a passage which came from a spurious Aristotelian treatise Περὶ Πυθαγορείων. What follows is Aristotle’s.
1.36
But Pythagoras’s great dignity not even Timon overlooked, who, although he digs at him in his Silli,Fr. 58 D. speaks of Pythagoras, inclined to witching works and ways, Man-snarer, fond of noble periphrase.
1.36
XenophanesFr. 7 D. confirms the statement about his having been different people at different times in the elegiacs beginning: Now other thoughts, another path, I show. What he says of him is as follows: They say that, passing a belaboured whelp, He, full of pity, spake these words of dole: Stay, smite not ! ’Tis a friend, a human soul; I knew him straight whenas I heard him yelp !
1.37
Thus Xenophanes. But Cratinus also lampooned him both in the Pythagorizing Woman and also in The Tarentines, where we readCratin. minor, Meineke, C.G.F. iii. 376.: They are wont, If haply they a foreigner do find, To hold a cross-examination Of doctrines’ worth, to trouble and confound him With terms, equations, and antitheses Brain-bung’d with magnitudes and periphrases. Again, Mnesimachus in the AlcmaeonMeineke, C.G.F. iii. 567.: To Loxias we sacrifice: Pythagoras his rite, Of nothing that is animate we ever take a bite.
