[725] Empedoklês, ap. Aristot. Rhetoric. i, 14, 2; Sextus Empiric. ix, 127; Plutarch, De Esu Carnium, pp. 993, 996, 997; where he puts Pythagoras and Empedoklês together, as having both held the doctrine of the metempsychosis, and both prohibited the eating of animal food. Empedoklês supposed that plants had souls, and that the souls of human beings passed after death into plants as well as into animals. “I have been myself heretofore (said he) a boy, a girl, a shrub, a bird, and a fish of the sea.”
ἤδη γάρ ποτ᾽ ἐγὼ γενόμην κοῦρός τε κόρη τε,
θάμνος τ᾽, οἴωνός τε καὶ ἐξ ἁλὸς ἔμπυρος ἰχθύς.
(Diogen. L. viii, 77; Sturz. ad Empedokl. Frag. p. 466.) Pythagoras is said to have affirmed that he had been not only Euphorbus in the Grecian army before Troy, but also a tradesman, a courtezan, etc., and various other human characters, before his actual existence; he did not, however, extend the same intercommunion to plants, in any case.
The abstinence from animal food was an Orphic precept as well as a Pythagorean (Aristophan. Ran. 1032).
[726] Strabo, vi, p. 263; Diogen. L. viii, 40.
[727] Diogen. Laërt. ix, 18.
[728] Herodot. iii, 131; Strabo, vi, p. 261: Menander de Encomiis, p. 96, ed. Heeren. Ἀθηναίους ἐπὶ ἀγαλματοποιΐα τε καὶ ζωγραφικῇ, καὶ Κροτωνιάτας ἐπὶ ἰατρικῇ, μέγα φρονῆσαι, etc.
The Krotoniate Alkmæon, a younger contemporary of Pythagoras (Aristotel. Metaph. i, 5), is among the earliest names mentioned as philosophizing upon physical and medical subjects. See Brandis, Handbuch der Geschicht. der Philos. sect. lxxxiii, p. 508, and Aristotel. De Generat. Animal. iii, 2, p. 752, Bekker.
The medical art in Egypt, at the time when Pythagoras visited that country, was sufficiently far advanced to excite the attention of an inquisitive traveller,—the branches of it minutely subdivided and strict rules laid down for practice (Herodot. ii, 84; Aristotel. Politic, iii, 10, 4).