 There is currently a very wide range of opinions about the relationship of Plato to Pythagoreanism. Many scholars both ancient and modern have thought that Plato was very closely tied to Pythagoreanism. In the biography of Pythagoras read by Photius in the 9th century CE (Bibl. 249) Plato is presented as a member of the Pythagorean school. He is the pupil of Archytas and the ninth successor to Pythagoras himself. If this were true then Plato would certainly be the most illustrious early Pythagorean after Pythagoras himself. Some modern scholars, while not going this far, have seen the connections between Plato and the Pythagoreans to be very close indeed. Thus, A. E. Taylor in his great commentary on the Timaeus says that his main thesis is that “the teaching of Timaeus [in Plato’s Timaeus] can be shown to be in detail exactly what we should expect from an fifth-century Italian Pythagorean” (1928, 11). Guthrie in his famous history of ancient philosophy commented that Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy were so close that it is difficult to separate them (1975, 35). Recently it has been argued that Plato was so steeped in Pythagoreanism that he structured his dialogues by counting numbers of lines and placing important passages at points in the dialogue that correspond to important ratios in Pythagorean harmonic theory (Kennedy, 2010 and 2011). Thus, the vision of the form of beauty appears 3/4 of the way through the Symposium by line count and the ratio 3 : 4 corresponds to the central musical interval of the fourth. There are, however, serious questions about the methodology used (Gregory 2012) and it is a serious problem both that no one in the ancient world reports that Plato used such a practice and that the middle of the dialogue, which corresponds to the most concordant musical interval, the octave (2:1), does not usually contain the most philosophically important content. Another approach sees Plato as engaged with and heavily influenced by Pythagorean ideas in passages where the Pythagoreans are not specifically mentioned in dialogues such as the Cratylus (401b11-d7) and Phaedo (101b10–104c9) (Horky 2013). The problem is that in contrast to the Philebus, where the connection to Philolaus is clear (see below), the connections to the Pythagoreans in these passages are too indirect or general (e.g., the concepts odd and even and the number 3 in the Phaedo passage are not unique to the Pythagoreans) to be very convincing and partly depend on the doubtful assumption that Epicharmus was a Pythagorean (see section 3.4 above). The central text for many of those who see Plato as closely tied to Pythagoreanism is Aristotle’s comment in Metaphysics 1.6 that Plato “followed these men (i.e. the Pythagoreans according to these scholars) in most respects” (987a29–31). In contrast to these attempts to connect Plato closely to Pythagoreanism, most recent Platonic scholars seem to think Pythagoreanism of little importance for Plato. Thus two prominent handbooks to Plato’s thought (Kraut 1992; Benson 2006) and another book of essays devoted specifically to the Timaeus, (Mohr and Sattler 2010) hardly mention the Pythagoreans at all. 