 Aristoxenus reports that two Tarentines, Lysis and Archippus, were the sole survivors when the house of Milo in Croton was burned, during a meeting of the Pythagoreans, by their enemies (Iamblichus, VP 250). A later romantic version in Plutarch (On the Sign of Socrates 583a) has it that Lysis and Philolaus were the two survivors, but it appears that the famous name of Philolaus has been substituted for Archippus, about whom nothing else is known. Aristoxenus goes on to say that Lysis left southern Italy and went first to Achaea in the Peloponnese before finally settling in Thebes, where the famous Theban general, Epaminondas, became his pupil and called him father. In order to be the teacher of Epaminondas in the early fourth century, Lysis must have been born no earlier than about 470. Thus the conflagration that he escaped as a young man must have been part of the attacks on the Pythagoreans around 450, rather than those that occurred around 500, when Pythagoras himself was still alive. The later sources often conflate these two attacks on the Pythagoreans (Minar 1942, 53). Nothing is known of the philosophy of Lysis, but it seems probable that he should be regarded as one of the acusmatici, since his training of Epaminondas appears to have emphasized a way of life rather than mathematical or scientific studies (Diodorus Siculus X 11.2) and Epaminondas’ use of the name father for Lysis suggests a cult association (Burkert 1972a, 179). In the later tradition, Lysis became quite famous as the author of a spurious letter (Thesleff 1965, 111; cf. Iamblichus, VP 75–78) rebuking a certain Hipparchus for revealing Pythagorean teachings to the uninitiated (see on the Pythagorean pseudepigrapha below, sect. 4.2).