THE BROTHERHOOD OF NUMBER: A NOVEL PYTHAGORAS

Pythagoras is the sixteenth life in the Ancient Civilisations series. All things are number. This was his claim. Then someone proved that some things are not. He kept going anyway. He left no writings of his own. His followers kept his teachings secret, swore vows of silence, and forbade certain foods for reasons no ancient source can fully explain. And yet his name survives as one of the most consequential in the history of mathematics, attached to a theorem every schoolchild still learns and to a vision of the universe that may be closer to modern physics than any other idea from the ancient world. Pythagoras travelled from Samos to Egypt and Babylon before arriving, unknown, in the Greek colony of Croton, where, within days, hundreds of citizens of every age and class abandoned their old lives to follow him. What he taught them was extraordinary: that number is the foundation of reality, that musical harmony and the motion of the planets obey the same mathematical ratios, that the soul is immortal and migrates between lives, and that a life of mathematical contemplation is the path to the soul's release. The same mind that proved the relationship between the sides of a right triangle also banned the eating of beans, claimed to remember fighting at Troy in a previous life, and built a secretive brotherhood that would, in time, govern the city that had welcomed him; and eventually be destroyed by it. This novel follows Pythagoras from the harbour at Samos to the Brotherhood's catastrophic end in flames at Croton, through the philosophical partnership of his wife Theano, the political crisis brought by a rejected aspirant named Cylon, and the discovery (by one of his own followers) that some numbers cannot be expressed as a ratio at all, a finding that should have shattered everything he taught. It holds the genius and the strangeness in the same frame, because they were never two different things. A vivid, intellectually exhilarating reconstruction of the philosopher who believed the universe was built from number, and whose vision, though it was proved incomplete, has never stopped being asked of the world since. The Brotherhood of Number is the sixteenth novel in the Ancient Civilisations series.