Customer.—­One, two, three, four——­

Pythagoras.—­Ha! what you call four is ten, and the perfect triangle, and the great oath by which we swear.

Customer.—­Now, so help me, the great ten and four, I never heard more divine or more wonderful words!

Pythagoras.—­And afterwards, stranger, you shall learn about Earth, and Air, and Water, and Fire—­what is their action, and what their form, and what their motion.

Customer.—­What! have Fire, Air, or Water bodily shape?

Pythagoras.—­Surely they have; else, without form and shape, how could they move!  Besides, you shall learn that the Deity consists in Number, Mind, and Harmony.

Customer.—­What you say is really wonderful.

Pythagoras.—­Besides what I have just told you, you shall understand that you yourself, who seem to be one individual, are really somebody else.

Customer.—­What! do you mean to say I’m somebody else, and not myself, now talking to you?

Pythagoras.—­Just at this moment you are; but once upon a time you appeared in another body, and under another name; and hereafter you will pass again into another shape still.

(After a little more discussion of this philosopher’s tenets, he is purchased on behalf of a company of professors from Magna Graeca for ten minae.  The next lot is Diogenes, the Cynic.)

Apuleius says in the Florida, Section XV., in reference to Pythagoras, that he went to Egypt to acquire learning, “that he was there taught by the priests the incredible power of ceremonies, the wonderful commutations of numbers, and the most ingenious figures of geometry; but that, not satisfied with these mental accomplishments, he afterwards visited the Chaldaeans and the Brahmins, and amongst the latter the Gymnosophists.  The Chaldaeans taught him the stars, the definite orbits of the planets, and the various effects of both kinds of stars upon the nativity of men, as also, for much money, the remedies for human use derived from the earth, the air, and the sea (the elements earth, air, and water, or all nature).

“But the Brahmins taught him the greater part of his philosophy—­what are the rules and principles of the understanding; what the functions of the body; how many the faculties of the soul; how many the mutations of life; what torments or rewards devolve upon the souls of the dead, according to their respective deserts.”

There is ample evidence, therefore, that the Greeks had communication with, and borrowed the philosophy of, both Persia and India at a very early date.