Pythagorean Mythicism (i.e., did Pythagoras exist?)

[theomise]

Question: Was Pythagoras a historical personage?

(To put my question in context: I (personally) believe it is rational to assume the following are historical figures:

• Socrates,
  Democritus,
  Plato,
  Aristotle,
  Alexander the Great,
  Epicurus,
  Julius Ceasar,
  Pontius Pilate,
  Philo,
  Seneca Jr,
  Josephus,
  Tacitus,
  etc etc [I'm comfortable listing at least 100 other names in the pre-100AD period].
  )

However, I don't have the same ontological comfort vis-a-vis Pythagoras...
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So anyway, how would you characterize your confidence that Pythagoras existed as a historical person?

[MrMacSon]

Socrates may be a literary character created by Plato.

maryhelena has proposed recently that Josephus is a literary composite character.

[theomise]

Socrates may be a literary character created by Plato.

maryhelena has proposed recently that Josephus is a literary composite character.

But Socrates is attested by other contemporary writers - Xenophon, Aristophanes, ....

Plus, he was never deified and/or incorporated into a religious ritual.

I'm open to a complicated Josephus story - but at the end of the day, some poor bloke or blokes wrote a metric SHIT-TON of prose. Whatever...

Now, Pythagoras? Still an open question, IMHO.

[Blood]

Here's a good article on the current status of Pythagoras scholarship from the London Review of Books

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n04/mf-burnyeat/other-lives

His existence is not questioned, but everything else about him is.

[ficino]

Good review, Blood, thanks for posting this. I always find Burnyeat's views worth reading.

I especially note this by Burnyeat: "The more arbitrary the discipline, the more it works to reinforce belief in the cause. For only the truth of the belief and the righteousness of the cause could justify the hardship of submission."

There's also the stark distinction between those on the way to purification and the rest of humanity.

Makes me think of The Manual of Discipline in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

[maryhelena]

Socrates may be a literary character created by Plato.

maryhelena has proposed recently that Josephus is a literary composite character.

Wow...don't think I wrote anything like that.....All I've said re Josephus is that I think 'Josephus' is a pseudonym. It's the NT figure of Paul that I'm thinking is a composite literary figure.

[MrMacSon]

... All I've said re Josephus is that I think 'Josephus' is a pseudonym.

oops, Sorry. I should have checked exactly what you said.

[maryhelena]

... All I've said re Josephus is that I think 'Josephus' is a pseudonym.

oops, Sorry. I should have checked exactly what you said.

No problem....

[ficino]

Because they didn't consider one a number. It was a basic principle.

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edited to add: Did someone delete a post? I thought somebody asked why it is said that Pythagoreans held three to be the first odd number.

I could have added that the whole question about which is the first odd number may have originated in Plato's Academy. Almost all our sources about "Pythagorean" doctrine are infected by Platonism. The One is a basic principle in what Aristotle and others describe as Plato's unwritten doctrines.

Blood, an interesting review by Carl Huffman of a revision and expansion of Leonid Zhmud's book on Pythagoras and Pythgoreanism. Both Huffman and Zhmud are major contributors to the field.

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2014/2014-08-30.html

No mainstream scholar I've heard of thinks that Pythagoras did not exist, btw.

[theomise]

No mainstream scholar I've heard of thinks that Pythagoras did not exist, btw.

Are you kidding?