Note 47 — BOOK I[1] THE PHILOSOPHERS
Francis Legge translation
Hippolytus like nearly every other writer of his time here confuses the Egyptians with the Alexandrian Greeks. It was these last and not the subjects of the Pharaohs who were given to mathematics and geometry, of which sciences they laid the foundations on which we have since built. Certain devotees of the Alexandrian god Serapis also shut themselves up in cells of the Serapeum, which they could hardly have done in any temple in Pharaonic times. See Forerunners, I, 79. Hippolytus gives a much more elaborate and detailed account of Pythagorean teaching in Book VI, II, pp. 20 ff. infra.