Pythagoras is said to have forbidden his followers to eat fava beans.
Later biographers even claimed he talked a bull out of eating beans and made a bear swear never to harm a living thing, and that the bear kept its word.
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More amazing facts
- 550 BC “Rich as Croesus” refers to the king who first struck coins of pure gold and pure silver.
- 547 BC The oracle did not lie to Croesus: a great empire did fall, his own. Herodotus says Delphi told the Lydian king that if he attacked Cyrus he would destroy a great empire.
- 539 BC The idiom 'the writing on the wall' comes from the fall of Babylon.
- 525 BC Legend says Persia conquered Egypt with the help of cats.
- 520 BC The word 'magic' is Persian in origin.
- 509 BC · 508 BC Rome expelled its last king in 509 BC and Athens got democracy from Cleisthenes in 508: republic and democracy were born almost side by side.