Over a hundred years before Plato, the Greek sage Pythagoras had set out on a journey to acquire the knowledge of the world. This led him to Egypt where he spent twenty-two years in the temples being initiated into the religion of the Egyptians. According to the ancient Greek scholar Diogenes Laertius, Plato purchased three books of Pythagorean doctrines based on Egyptian wisdom, and these he adapted into the Timaeus. The similarities between the works of Plato and the Hermetica are not surprising, therefore, since many of Plato's ideas were direct descendants of ancient Egyptian philosophy.
