Porphyry: The Holy Life and Laws of Pythagoras

Porphyry of Tyre, Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, H.P. Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 23 pages

Porphyry's Vita Pythagoræ in the translation of Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, published by the Platonist Press at Alpine, New Jersey around 1919, with commentary by Blavatsky whose theme is that Pythagoras' theory of numerals harmonised Monad and Duad, spirit and matter, with Plato's Infinite and Finite. The editorial note warns against a confusion easily made: this biography is not the work of the same title by Iamblichus, thought to have been Porphyry's disciple, which appears in this same series as Iamblichus on Pythagorean Sapience.

Porphyry's method is to report the disagreements rather than settle them. Many think Pythagoras the son of Mnesarchus but differ over his race, some making him a Samian while Neanthes calls him a Syrian of Tyre who came to Samos to trade during a famine and was naturalised there; others say the father was a Tyrrhenian of Lemnos. Apollonius makes the mother Pythais, a descendant of Ancæus the founder of Samos, and records that he was said to be the offspring of Apollo — quoting a Samian poet on Pythais bearing Jove-loved Pythagoras to Phoebus. On the teachers there is more agreement: entrusted as a boy to the Chaldeans at Tyre, he returned to Ionia to study first under the Syrian Pherecydes and then under Hermodamas the Creophylian, an old man then living in Samos.

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