ts of their
ceremonies, passing all belief; there he learned numbers in all their
marvellous combinations, and the ingenious laws of geometry. Not
content with these sciences, he next approached the Chaldaeans and the
Brahmins, a race of wise men who live in India.[46] Among these
Brahmins he sought out the gymnosophists. The Chaldaeans taught him
the lore of the stars, the fixed orbits[47] of the wandering lords of
heaven, and the influence of each on the births of men. Also they
instructed him in the art of healing, and revealed to him remedies in
the search for which men have lavished their wealth and wandered far
by land and sea.[48] But it was from the Brahmins that he derived the
greater part of his philosophy, the arts of teaching the mind and
exercising the body, the doctrines as to the parts of the soul and its
various transmigrations, the knowledge of the torments and rewards
ordained for each man, according to his deserts, in the world of the
gods below. Further he had for his master Pherecydes, a native of the
island of Syros and the first who dared throw off the shackles of
verse and write in the free style of unfettered prose. Pherecydes died
of a horrible disease, for his flesh rotted and was devoured of lice;
Pythagoras buried him with reverent care. He is said also to have
studied the laws of nature under Anaximander of Miletus, to have
followed the Cretan Epimenides, a famous prophet skilled also in rites
of expiation, that he might learn from him and also Leodamas, the
pupil of Creophylus, the reputed guest and rival of the poet Homer.
Taught by so many sages, and having drained such deep and varied
draughts of learning through all the world, and being moreover dowered
with a vast intellect whose grandeur almost passes man's
understanding, he was the founder of the science and the inventor of
the name of philosophy. The first of all his lessons to his disciples
was the lesson of silence. With him meditation was a necessary
preliminary to wisdom, meditation set a bridle on all speech, robbed
words, which poets style winged, of their pinions and restrained them
within the white barrier of the teeth. This, I tell you, was for him
the first axiom of wisdom, 'Meditation is learning, speech is
unlearning.' His disciples, however, did not refrain from speech all
their lives, nor did their master impose dumbness on all for a like
space of time. For those of more solid character a brief term of
silence was con