statements. He was a native of Samos, and was drawn by the fame of Pherecydes to the island of Syros. He then visited the ancient Thales, who incited him to study in Egypt. He sojourned in Egypt many years, and may have visited Babylon. On his return to Samos, he found it under the tyranny of Polycrates. Failing in an attempt to found a school there, he quitted home again and, following the current of civilisation, removed to Magna Græcia in South Italy. He settled at Croton, and founded the famous Pythagorean school. This was not merely an academy for the teaching of philosophy, mathematics, and natural science, but it was a brotherhood, the members of which were united for life. This brotherhood had observances approaching masonic peculiarity. They were forbidden to divulge the discoveries and doctrines of their school. Hence we are obliged to speak of the Pythagoreans as a body, and find it difficult to determine to whom each particular discovery is to be ascribed. The Pythagoreans themselves were in the habit of referring every discovery back to the great founder of the sect.
This school grew rapidly and gained considerable political ascendency. But the mystic and secret observances, introduced in imitation of Egyptian usages, and the aristocratic tendencies of the school, caused it to become an object of suspicion. The democratic party in Lower Italy revolted and destroyed the buildings of the Pythagorean school. Pythagoras fled to Tarentum and thence to Metapontum, where he was murdered.
Pythagoras has left behind no mathematical treatises, and our sources of information are rather scanty. Certain it is that, in the Pythagorean school, mathematics was the principal study. Pythagoras raised mathematics to the rank of a science. Arithmetic was courted by him as fervently as geometry. In fact, arithmetic is the foundation of his philosophic system.
