Moses and philosophy

In his Oration to the Saints , Constantine repeats the patristic commonplace that Greek philosophy owed a debt to Moses: “Moses excelled his predecessors in wisdom to such a degree that even those who were praised by the nations as wise men and philosophers came to emulate his wisdom. For Pythagoras, by imitating his wisdom, obtained so great a reputation for temperance as to make his self-denial a model for the most temperate Plato.”

This wasn’t Christian boastfulness. Pagan accounts of the of life of Pythagoras also mention that he learned from the Hebrews.

Porphyry says in his Life of Pythatoras (10-11) that the philosopher was the son of Tyrrhenian Mnesarchus. One of Pythagoras’s first students was an adopted brother, a foundling, whom Mnesarchus reared as his own: “On becoming wealthy, Mnesarchus educated the boy, naming him Astrasus, and rearing him with his own three sons, Eunestus, Tyrrhenus, and Pythagoras; which boy, as I have said, Androcles adopted. He sent the boy to a lute-player, a wrestler and a painter. Later he sent him to Anaximander at Miletus, to learn geometry and astronomy. Then Pythagoras visited the Egyptians, the Arabians, the Chaldeans and the Hebrews, from whom he acquired experterise in the interpretation of dreams, and he was the first to use frankincense in the worship of divinities.”

Iamblichus makes a similar claim in On the Pythagorean Life (14).