Pythagoras founds his school at Croton
- Date
- c. 530 BCE
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Magna Graecia (Croton, southern Italy)
- Era
- Classical Antiquity
- Significance
Around 530 BCE the Ionian sage Pythagoras emigrated from Samos to the Greek colony of Croton in southern Italy, where he founded a religious and philosophical brotherhood that combined ascetic communal life with intensive study of number, geometry and music.
The Pythagoreans held that number was the underlying principle of reality and discovered the numerical ratios governing musical harmony, fusing mathematics, cosmology and a doctrine of the transmigration of the soul. Though the famous theorem on right triangles bearing his name was known earlier in Babylonia, the Pythagorean tradition gave Greek mathematics its emphasis on abstract proof and the harmonious, mathematical order of the cosmos. The community also wielded considerable political influence in Croton until a backlash drove its members out. Pythagorean ideas about the soul, mathematical reality and cosmic harmony deeply influenced Plato and the later Western philosophical and scientific tradition, linking the mystical and the rational in a way that endured for centuries.
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Empires active in c. 530 BCE
- Achaemenid Empire550 BCE to 330 BCE
- Roman Kingdom753 BCE to 509 BCE
- Scythians800 BCE to 300 BCE
- Zhou Dynasty1046 BCE to 256 BCE
- Carthaginian Empire650 BCE to 146 BCE
- Kingdom of Kush1070 BCE to 350 CE
Related culture, arts & philosophy events
- Life and teaching of Confucius in China551 to 479 BCE
- Darius I's Behistun Inscriptionc. 520 BCE
- Panini composes the Ashtadhyayi, the first systematic grammarc. 400 BCE
- Nok Terracotta Sculpture Tradition Flourishesc. 500 BCE
- Thales of Miletus and the predicted eclipse: the dawn of natural philosophy28 May 585 BCE (traditional)
- Construction of the Parthenon in Periclean Athens447 to 432 BCE
Essential reading
- Invention of Standardised Coinage in Lydia (the Lydian Stater)c. 630 BCE
- Han-Xiongnu Heqin Treaty Inaugurates Tribute-and-Marriage Diplomacy198 BC
- Earliest securely dated Maya/Mesoamerican Long Count inscription36 BCE (Long Count 7.16.3.2.13)
- Wang Mang nationalises land under the Xin dynastyAD 9
Further reading
The wider story
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