5. The Papyrological Tradition on Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans

Abstract

I begin my overview of the papyrological evidence on Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans not chronologically but from a chreia on Pythagoras the philosopher and grammar teacher, found on the school wooden tablet (41,5×13,5 сm) of the 3rd or the 4th cent. AD.1 Published more than a century ago, the chreia received its second birth after David Sedley’s brilliant paper, the first to interpret this text methodically.2 The tablet contains two exercises set by a teacher (γραμματικός) of a Greek school in Egypt to his students: on the verso, to conjugate all the optatives and participles of νικάω, and on the recto, to decline in all cases and numbers, which is to say fifteen times, the following chreia: