Moderatus of Gades

Moderatus of Gades was a Greek philosopher of the Neopythagorean school, who lived in the 1st century AD, (contemporary with Apollonius of Tyana). He wrote a great work on the doctrines of the Pythagoreans, and tried to show that the successors of Pythagoras had made no additions to the views of their founder, but had merely borrowed and altered the phraseology.

He has been given an exaggerated importance by some commentators, who have regarded him as the forerunner of the Alexandrian School of philosophy. Zeller has shown that the authority on which this view is based is unsound. Moderatus is thus left as an unimportant though interesting representative of a type of thought which had almost disappeared since the 5th century BC.

Stobaeus, in his Eclogae, preserves a fragment of his writings; further extracts survive in the form of quotations in Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras and Simplicius's commentary on Aristotle's Physics.

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.