 In recent scholarship, the tendency has been to regard Diodorus and the Pythagorists as legitimate Pythagoreans of the acusmatic stamp, whose eccentricities are perhaps a little exaggerated in comedy. The extensive evidence from antiquity which argues that they were not true Pythagoreans is interpreted as bias on the part of conservative Pythagoreans of the hyper-mathêmatici sort, such as Aristoxenus, who wanted to disassociate themselves and Pythagoreanism in general from such strange people. This is a possible interpretation of the evidence, but, as the evidence for Diodorus shows, it is also quite possible that Diodorus and the more extreme Pythagorists depicted in comedy were in fact people with whom few Pythagoreans either of the mathêmatici or the acusmatici wanted to associate themselves. Many religious movements have a radical fringe, and there is little reason to think that Pythagoreanism should differ in this regard. In connection with his thesis that the  acusmata were a literary phenomenon and that no one lived a life in accordance with them Zhmud argues that the Pythagorists of comedy are a creation of the comic stage and do not provide evidence for Pythagoreans living a life governed by acusmata (Zhmud 2012a, 175–183). It is true that many of the features of the Pythagorists are shared with Socrates as presented in the Clouds (subtle arguments, plain food, filthy clothes). Zhmud suggests that vegetarianism was added to this stock picture of the philosopher to give a Pythagorean color and that this vegetarianism was derived solely from the eccentric figure of Diodorus of Aspendus. However, as noted above there are more connections to the acusmata than just vegetarianism and it is hard to believe that the repeated jokes at the expense of those living a Pythagorean life had no correlate in reality other than Diodorus. 