  There is some controversy as to whether Pythagoras, in fact, taught a way of life governed in great detail by the acusmata as described above. Plato praises the Pythagorean way of life in the Republic (600b), but it is hard to imagine him admiring the set of taboos found in the acusmata (Lloyd 2014, 44; Zhmud 2012a). Although acusmata were collected already by Anaximander of Miletus the younger (ca. 400 BCE) and by Aristotle in the fourth century, Zhmud (2012a, 177–178 and 192–205) argues that very few of these embody specifically Pythagorean ideas and that it is difficult to imagine anyone following this bewildering set of rules literally as Burkert argues (1972a, 191). However, the early evidence suggests that Pythagoras largely constructed the acusmata out of ideas collected from others (Thom 2013; Huffman 2008b: Gemelli Marciano 2002), so it is no surprise that many of them are not uniquely Pythagorean. Moreover, Thom suggests a middle ground between Zhmud and Burkert whereby, contra Zhmud, most of the acusmata were followed by the Pythagoreans but contra Burkert, they were subject to interpretation from the beginning and not followed literally, so that it is possible to imagine people living according to them (Thom, 2013). It is true that there is little if any fifth- and fourth-century evidence for Pythagoreans living according to the acusmata and Zhmud argues that the undeniable political impact of the Pythagoreans would be inexplicable if they lived the heavily ritualized life of the acusmata, which would inevitably isolate them from society (Zhmud 2012a, 175–183). He suggests that the Pythagorean way of life differed little from standard aristocratic morality (Zhmud 2012a, 175). If, however, the Pythagorean way of life was little out of the ordinary, why do Plato and Isocrates specifically comment on how distinctive those who followed it were? The silence of fifth-century sources about people practicing acusmata is not terribly surprising given the very meager sources for the Greek cities in southern Italy in the period. Why not suppose that the vast majority of names in Aristoxenus’ catalogue of Pythagoreans, who are not associated with any political, philosophical or scientific accomplishment, who are just names to us, are preceisely those who were Pythagoreans because they followed the Pythagorean way of life? We would then have lots of people who followed the acusmata (166 of the 222 name in the catalogue appear nowhere else). This suspicion is confirmed by the fact that one of the names from Arsitoxenus’ catalogue (Hippomedon of Argos) is elsewhere (Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Life, 87) explicitly said to belong the acusmatici. Moreover, other scholars argue that archaic Greek society in southern Italy was pervaded by religion and the presence of similar precepts in authors such as Hesiod show that adherence to taboos such as are found in the acusmata would not have caused a scandal and adherence to many of them would have gone unobserved by outsiders (Gemelli Marciano 2014, 133–134).