 A number of these characteristics can be connected to the acusmata (Arnott 1996, 583), e.g., the lack of bathing may be a joke based on the acusma that forbids the Pythagoreans from using the public baths (Iamblichus, VP 83), Antiphanes (fr. 158) satirizes the acusmata’s bizarre list of foods that can be eaten (D.L. 8.19) by describing his Pythagoreans as searching for sea orach, and the silence or sullenness ascribed to the Pythagoreans in comedy accords not just with the acusmata but with early testimony about the Pythagoreans in Isocrates (Busiris 29) and Dicaearchus (Fr. 40 Mirhady). A fragment of Aristophon’s Pythagorist suggests that this ascetic life was based on poverty rather than philosophical scruple and that, if you put meat and fish in front of these Pythagorists, they would gobble them down (Fr. 9 = Athenaeus IV 161e). In a fragment of Alexis, after the speaker reports that the Pythagoreans eat nothing animate, he is interrupted by someone who objects that “Epicharides eats dogs, and he is a Pythagorean,” to which the response is, “yes, but he kills them first and so they are not still animate” (Fr. 223 + Athenaeus 161b). Epicharides and some other named figures may well be Athenians who are satirized by being assigned a Pythagorean life (Athenaeus 2006, 272). Another fragment of Aristophon’s Pythagorist reports that the Pythagoreans have a far different existence in the underworld than others, in that they feast with Hades because of their piety, but this just occasions the remark that Hades is an unpleasant god to enjoy the company of such filthy wretches (Fr. 12 = Diogenes Laertius VIII 38).