L HARVEY] PYTHAGORAS AND HIS PHILOSOPHY 241 



served up at a banquet by his cook.^ This we may or may not credit, 

 hut we can readily believe and see the reason wihy the fleets of Amasis 

 often visited. Sanios on their way to the various ^gean isles and to 

 the settlements on the Asiatic coasts of Italy. 



Such was the island where this vigorous young man, Pythagoras, 

 first saw the light. He i'; said to have been studious from an early 

 age, to have received instruction from several teachers, and among them 

 i? mentioned Pherecydes, a Syrian. Great as his opportunities were 

 at home, he left his native isle while yet a youth, to add to local 

 knowledge that which other peoples possessed. As men now go up 

 to Oxford, or to some German university, so then they went to Egypt, 

 the nearest great repository of learning. Solon, of Athens, poet and 

 lawyer, had just been there, at Heliopolis, as had Thaïes, the founder 

 of the Ionic Confederation and the first of the Greeks who speculated 

 on cosmogony. Plato was afterwards to tread in their footsteps. But 

 Pythagoras is said to have had unusual advantages; he was favoured 

 with a letter of introduction from Polycrates to Amasis, sojourned in 

 Egypt for some years, and became proficient in the language of the coun- 

 try, where he learned their secret views about religion, (^Tà n^pï dsœv,') 

 On his way to Egypt he had tarried a while in Crete, and, with 

 Epimenides, had visited the Idsean cave. It is only yesterday that 

 archseologioal discoveries in Crete have made us aware how important 

 a centre of art and industry the island had been before his time and 

 perhaps still was. From Egypt, he went to Babylon. Cicero {de fin. 

 lib. V, 29) exclaims, "Why did Pythagoras survey Egypt and visit the 

 Persian Magi (but in pursuit of knowledge) : why did he cross afoot so 

 many foreign lands ? " How he was induced to go there is not difficult 

 to understand, though the accounts seem tinged with romance. Apuleius 

 rioridus says : " Some recount that when he was being carried about 

 " Egypt, among the captives of King Cambyses " (who had just swept 

 down through that country with his victorious army and added it to 

 his dominions), " he met learned Persian magi, and especially Zoroaster, 

 ''the expounder of divine mysteries. But a more trustworthy report 

 "is as follows: Having of his own desire sought for Egyptian leam- 

 " ing and acquired from the priests of that country a knowledge of 

 '' their religion, of the wonderful powers of numbers (which are hard 

 "to believe) and of the best theorems in Geometry, he was not yet 

 "satisfied, but of his own free will visited the Chaldaeans and even 



* Somewhat analogous is a statement by Mr. John Maughan, of Toronto, 

 that when cleaning for his shooting party's lunch a duck killed on Shoal Lake, 

 west of Rat Portage, the cook found a nugget of gold in the bird's crop. 



Sec. II., ia(J4. 16 



