 Pythagoras is one of the most famous names in the ancient philosophical tradition, and there is a natural tendency to assume that he was responsible for the most fruitful ideas in the Pythagorean tradition. One of the dominant trends in recent scholarship on Pythagoras, however, is to recognize that his fame grew exponentially with the passage of time and that the early evidence, down to the time of Plato and Aristotle, when examined carefully, reveals that Pythagoras was indeed famous but not as a typical Presocratic cosmologist nor as a mathematician/ scientist. In the early tradition Pythagoras is consistently presented as a charismatic teacher famous for two things: 1) his expertise on the fate of the soul in the next life as represented in the doctrine of transmigration of souls 2) his founding of a way of life which some people still followed a hundred years after his death. This way of life involved moral and religious teachings that were embodied in a series of brief sayings known as acousmata, which included ritual taboos and dietary restrictions such as the famous prohibition on eating beans (Burkert 1972a, 166–92). There is no evidence that Philolaus made any significant contribution in these areas. Plato’s suggestion in the Phaedo that Philolaus had something to say about the prohibition against suicide is the closest we get to a pronouncement on how to live one’s life. It seems most reasonable to assume that he followed, to a greater or lesser degree, the Pythagorean life handed down from the time of Pythagoras, who died some twenty years before Philolaus was born. There are a few hints that he tried to reconcile the mythic and religious side of Pythagoreanism with his own naturalistic explanation of the world (see 4.2 and 5.1 above).