 What led Nigidius and Varro to resurrect purported Pythagorean cult practices? One important influence may have been the Greek scholar Alexander Polyhistor, who was born in Miletus but was captured by the Romans during the Mithridatic wars and brought to Rome as a slave and freed by Sulla in 80 BCE. He taught in Rome in the 70s. It is an intriguing suggestion that Nigidius learned his Pythagoreanism from Alexander (Dillon 1977, 117; For critiques of this suggestion see Flinterman 2014, 349–350 and Long 2013, 145). There is no evidence that Alexander himself followed Pythagorean practices, but he wrote a book On Pythagorean Symbols, which was presumably an account of the Pythagorean acusmata (or symbola), which set out the taboos that governed many aspects of the Pythagorean way of life. In addition, in his Successions of the Philosophers, he gave a summary of Pythagorean philosophy, which he supposedly found in the Pythagorean Notes (See section 4.2 above) and which has been preserved by Diogenes Laertius (VIII 25–35). The basic principles assigned to Pythagoras are those of the Neopythagorean tradition that begins in the early Academy, i.e., the monad and the indefinite dyad. Since Alexander also assigns to the Pythagoreans the doctrine that the elements change into one another, we might suppose that Ovid also used Alexander directly or indirectly, since he assigns a similar doctrine to Pythagoras in the Metamorphoses (XV 75 ff., Rawson 1985, 294).