ABSTRACT
Whether or not the story has a core of truth, it shows in any case what secrecy means. The deity, it says, imposed a just punishment: that can only mean that the Pythagoreans bound themselves by an oath not to make their communal knowledge public (without a religious tie the gods need not have intervened). The banishment of the rebel by declaring him dead must have been an effective sanction as long as the political strength of the community was unbroken. The motive for the banishment was scarcely concern about the appropriate reception of the material to be withheld: it was a matter of a mathematical theorem, and thus of a type of material which can most readily be passed on without taking account of the inner makeup of the recipient. Obviously, the real issue was the privilege of knowledge. It is therefore not surprising that Hippasus was later ascribed democratic sympathies:109 anyone who makes any knowledge public which privileges a community is obviously regarded as the subverter of the strength of the community in other respects as well.
