Archytas Unbound

Abstract No One till now has devoted a whole book to Archytas’ thought. Specialists in Greek mathematics and related sciences comment often enough on certain of the fragments and reports about him, but he has tended to be marginalized and rather oddly contextualized by historians of philosophy. His work falls squarely into the fourth century bc, yet as Carl Hu·man notes in this admirable volume (44–5), he has regularly been treated as a sort of honorary Presocratic. The Archytan fragments and testimonia are included in the standard collection of texts on the Presocratics by Diels and Kranz (hereafter DK); and Guthrie, for example, discusses him (briefly) just before Xenophanes, who was more than a century his senior.3 Further, in both these books and many others he appears as a ‘footnote to Pythagoras and Presocratic Pythagoreanism’, despite the fact that Aristotle, one of our most authoritative witnesses (who mentions him on several occasions, and devoted a three-book treatise and part of another to his work), never calls him a Pythagorean, and never mentions him in the same context as those to whom he does give this title.