In 1726 Benjamin Franklin compiled a list of Thirteen Virtues:
1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes or habitation.
11. TRANQUILITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health of offspring, never to dullness, weakness or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

  ‘Humility’ he added to a later edition; having been accused of practising Pride, by boasting of those other virtues. The content and form of this compilation was inspired by and based upon The Golden Verses of Pythagoras with its 71 homespun helpful hints. There was also mention of stoic Hierocles – the ‘eight circles of cosmopolitanism’ guy – although I see no connection. But, Franklin was a right clever bastard. My favourite autobiographical bit is his enjoying being tagged a ‘Water-American’ by his mostly-Irish printer mates when working a press in Cripplegate, London EC1 – which he claimed was due to oceanic voyaging, but was really a swipe at a teetotal bent. Has nothing to do with classical Greece, but that insightful list of quiet commandments caught my eye.
  As there is no remaining hardcopy evidence of Pythagoras’ writings we have to trust fragments left by his students known now as the Pythagoreans. A lack of provenance that raises questions of his approved pre-eminence as no one believes a solitary soul could be responsible for such an aggregation of pure and practical pedantic genius. Turns out a fair and logical conclusion if one believes the legend of followers refusing to claim conception of their brilliant ideas – one, Hippasus was set adrift to drown in a storm for declaring a unique unpublished position on irrational numbers – all theorems thence rapidly assigned to numerological spirits, via The Master.
  Keep in mind that Aristotle was taught by Plato who was taught by Socrates who was taught by Pythagoreans. There is a cryptic, yet convincing case for Pythagoras being the DADDY of it all… of what we know as Western Civilisation.

  Here’s another list:
• Pythagoras was born in 555BC
• Siddhartha Gautama, known as Buddha was born circa 560BC
• Kong Fuzi, Latinized as Confucius was born in 551BC
• Malachi, the last Hebrew prophet was born around 550BC
  Now call me an old-fashioned, dog-eared cynic, but there are no coincidences; I believe we have what’s currently called a conspiracy theory pending here…
  Were they the same man? Were they spacemen or a single spaceman? Were they clever men chosen and visited by spacemen? Were they attended by a god or separate gods? Did they travel and meet at some central point; there to be taught by a VERY clever man or woman, god or spaceman – as each has a gap in his mythic middle history?
  Pythagoras, Buddha and Confucius were all vegetarians who believed in reincarnation – more haphazard? I do not know any teachings of Malachi; whom I include in the roster as a probable writer of extended sections of our last Old Testament – upon which the desert religions are based. On a parallax line; if you read Aristotle and Plato correctly, you’ll be amazed to identify piecemeal portions of the christian New Testament contained therein. I firmly recommend Plato’s dialogues; try The Phaedo if you want to discover the Garden of Gethsemane – 400 years before the Jesus character possibly lived?
  I’d like someone with actual academic intelligence to research the above. I checked Wikipedia and no one has thus far. I CANNOT be the only person to have noticed this… incongruity…