page_title: Pythagoras
section_title: On literature
hierarchical_section_title: Pythagoras / Influence after antiquity / On literature
caption_attribution_description: Rosa Celeste: Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven, The Empyrean
context_page_description: Pythagoras of Samos was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His political and religious teachings were well known in Magna Graecia and influenced the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and, through them, Western philosophy. Knowledge of his life is clouded by legend, but he appears to have been the son of Mnesarchus, a gem-engraver on the island of Samos, then ruled by the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Modern scholars disagree regarding Pythagoras's education and influences, but they do agree that, around 530 BC, he travelled to Croton in southern Italy, where he founded a school in which initiates were sworn to secrecy and lived a communal, ascetic lifestyle. This lifestyle entailed a number of dietary prohibitions, traditionally said to have included vegetarianism, although modern scholars doubt that he ever advocated for complete vegetarianism.
  The teaching most securely identified with Pythagoras is metempsychosis, or the "transmigration of souls", which holds that every soul is immortal and, upon death, enters into a new body.
context_section_description: Dante Alighieri was fascinated by Pythagorean numerology and based his descriptions of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven on Pythagorean numbers. Dante wrote that Pythagoras saw Unity as Good and Plurality as Evil and, in Paradiso XV, 56–57, he declares: "five and six, if understood, ray forth from unity." The number eleven and its multiples are found throughout the Divine Comedy, each book of which has thirty-three cantos, except for the Inferno, which has thirty-four, the first of which serves as a general introduction. Dante describes the ninth and tenth bolgias in the Eighth Circle of Hell as being twenty-two miles and eleven miles respectively, which correspond to the fraction , which was the Pythagorean approximation of pi. Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven are all described as circular and Dante compares the wonder of God's majesty to the mathematical puzzle of squaring the circle. The number three also features prominently: the Divine Comedy has three parts and Beatrice is associated with the number nine, which is equal to three times three.
  The Transcendentalists read the ancient Lives of Pythagoras as guides on how to live a model life. Henry David Thoreau was impacted by Thomas Taylor's translations of Iamblichus's Life of Pythagoras and Stobaeus's Pythagoric Sayings and his views on nature may have been influenced by the Pythagorean idea of images corresponding to archetypes. The Pythagorean teaching of musica universalis is a recurring theme throughout Thoreau's magnum opus, Walden.
caption: Dante Alighieri's description of Heaven in his Paradiso incorporates Pythagorean numerology.[291]
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