 Since Democritus was sometimes regarded as the pupil of Pythagoreans (Diogenes Laertius IX 38), Bolus’ choice of Democritus to give authority to his work may suggest that someone else (the Cleemporus mentioned by Pliny?) had already used Pythagoras for this purpose and that the pseudo-Pythagorean treatise on the magical properties of plants was thus already in existence when Bolus wrote, in the first half of the second century BCE. An example of the type of recipe involved is Pliny’s ascription to Democritus of the idea that the tongue of a frog, cut out while the frog was still alive, if placed above the heart of a sleeping woman, will cause her to give true answers (Nat. XXXII 49). Thus, the picture of Pythagoras the magician, which may lie behind a number of the supposed Pythagorean practices of Nigidius Figulus, is based on little more than the tradition that Pythagoras had traveled to Egypt and the east, so that he became the authority figure, to whom the real collectors of magical recipes in the third and second century BCE ascribed their collections.