Pythagoras 570–495 BCE

In the Greek imagination, there are few figures who sit more uneasily between history and legend than Pythagoras. Say his name today and most people think of a schoolroom diagram: a right triangle, some letters along its sides, and the neat little relation a² + b² = c². But if you were to step into a meeting of his followers in southern Italy in the late sixth century BCE, the man at the center of that future textbook figure would look nothing like a harmless geometry teacher. He would seem more like a founder of a religious order, a philosopher of cosmic harmony, and the leader of a disciplined community that treated numbers as the key not just to triangles, but to the structure of the soul and the order of the entire universe.

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