Pythagoras (580 BC - 490 BC)

Lifespan: born between 580 and 572 BC - died between 500 and 490 BC
Primary Base of Operations: Greek city of Croton in southern Italy
Schools of Thought: Pythagoreanism, Ionian
Other Occupations: Mathematician, Mystic and Scientist
Teacher: Anaximander (maybe)

- claimed men may be classified accordingly as lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

- believed in transmigration, or the reincarnation of the soul again and again into the bodies of humans, animals, or vegetables until it became moral. His ideas of reincarnation were influenced by Greek Mythology. He was one of the first to propose that the thought processes and the soul were located in the brain and not the heart. He himself claimed to have lived four lives that he could remember in detail, and heard the cry of his dead friend in the bark of a dog.

- established a secret religious society very similar to (and possibly influenced by) the earlier Orphic Cults. He opened his school to male and female students alike. Those who joined the inner circle of Pythagoras's society called themselves the Mathematikoi. They lived at the school, owned no personal possessions and were required to assume a vegetarian diet.

- Iamblichus claimed Pythagoras once said that "number is the ruler of forms and ideas and the cause of gods and demons."