  What then was the nature of Pythagoras’ cosmos?  The doxographical tradition reports that Pythagoras discovered the sphericity of the earth, the five celestial zones and the identity of the evening and morning star (Diogenes Laertius VIII. 48, Aetius III.14.1, Diogenes Laertius IX. 23). In each case, however, Burkert has shown that these reports seem to be false and the result of the glorification of Pythagoras in the later tradition, since the earliest and most reliable evidence assigns these same discoveries to someone else (1972a, 303 ff.). Thus, Theophrastus, who is the primary basis of the doxographical tradition, says that it was Parmenides who discovered the sphericity of the earth (Diogenes Laertius VIII. 48). Parmenides is also identified as the discoverer of the identity of the morning and evening star (Diogenes Laertius IX. 23), and Pythagoras’ claim appears to be based on a poem forged in his name, which was rejected already by Callimachus in the third century BCE (Burkert 1972a, 307). The identification of the five celestial zones depends on the discovery of the obliquity of the ecliptic, and some of the doxography duly assigns this discovery to Pythagoras as well and claims that Oenopides stole it from Pythagoras (Aetius II.12.2); the history of astronomy by Aristotle’s pupil Eudemus, our most reliable source, seems to attribute the discovery to Oenopides (there are problems with the text), however (Eudemus, Fr. 145 Wehrli). It thus appears that the later tradition, finding no evidence for Pythagoras’ cosmology in the early evidence, assigned the discoveries of Parmenides back to Pythagoras, encouraged by traditions which made Parmenides the pupil of Pythagoras. In the end, there is no evidence for Pythagoras’ cosmology in the early evidence, beyond what can be reconstructed from acusmata. As was shown above, Pythagoras saw the cosmos as structured according to number insofar as the tetraktys is the source of all wisdom. His cosmos was also imbued with a moral significance, which is in accordance with his beliefs about reincarnation and the fate of the soul (West 1971, 215–216; Huffman 2013, 60–68). Thus, in answer to the question “What are the Isles of the Blest?” (where we might hope to go, if we lived a good life), the answer is “the sun and the moon.” Again “the planets are the hounds of Persephone,” i.e., the planets are agents of vengeance for wrong done (Aristotle in Porphyry VP 41). Aristotle similarly reports that for the Pythagoreans thunder “is a threat to those in Tartarus, so that they will be afraid” (Posterior Analytics 94b) and another acusma says that “an earthquake is nothing other than a meeting of the dead” (Aelian, Historical Miscellany, IV. 17). Zhmud calls these cosmological acusmata into question (2012a, 329–330), noting that some only appear in Porphyry, but Porphyry explicitly identifies Aristotle as his source and we have no reason to doubt him (VP 41). Pythagoras’ cosmos embodied mathematical relationships that had a basis in fact and combined them with moral ideas tied to the fate of the soul. The best analogy for the type of account of the cosmos which Pythagoras gave might be some of the myths which appear at the end of Platonic dialogues such as the Phaedo, Gorgias or Republic, where cosmology has a primarily moral purpose.  Should the doctrine of the harmony of the spheres be assigned to Pythagoras? Certainly the acusma which talks of the sirens singing in the harmony represented by the tetraktys suggests that there might have been a cosmic music and that Pythagoras may well have thought that the heavenly bodies, which we see move across the sky at night, made music by their motions. On the other hand, there is no evidence for “the spheres,” if we mean by that a cosmic model according to which each of the heavenly bodies is associated with a series of concentric circular orbits, a model which is at least in part designed to explain celestical phenomena. The first such cosmic model in the Pythagorean tradition is that of Philolaus in the second half of the fifth century, a model which still shows traces of the connection to the moral cosmos of Pythagoras in its account of the counter-earth and the central fire (see Philolaus).