 There are a number of important correspondences between the description of the method of “the men before our time” in this and the immediately following passages of the Philebus and the fragments of Philolaus, e.g., the postulation of the limit and unlimited as basic principles, Plato’s insistence that number is the basis for all inquiring, learning, and teaching (16e; Philolaus, Fr. 4) and the use of the musical scale as a central example of the combination of limiter and unlimited (17b ff., Philolaus, Fr. 6a). There can be little doubt that Plato has Philolaus in mind, and he may be alluding to Philolaus’ method of archai (Huffman 2001). It is clear, however, that Plato is not taking over Philolaus’ metaphysical system wholesale but is rather using it as a way of addressing problems that have arisen with the theory of forms. Meinwald (2002) argues that Plato is either correcting or providing a sympathetic reinterpretation of Philolaus’ system, which allows Plato to suggest a way in which knowledge of forms may be mathematical. This reinterpretation transforms unlimiteds into pairs of opposites, in which limiters set ratios. This interpretation agrees with Aristotle’s claim that Plato differed from the Pythagoreans in making the unlimited a dyad (Metaph. 987b23–27). It has been common to assume that the Prometheus in the passage quoted above is a veiled reference to Pythagoras (Hackforth 1958, 21; Gosling 1975, 83). Yet, as we have seen, Aristotle never associates Pythagoras with this metaphysical scheme, and Plato elsewhere presents Pythagoras as a founder of a way of life and not as a master metaphysician (R. 600a–b). Modern scholars may be overreading the passage in light of Pythagoras’ fame in the later tradition. Prometheus was traditionally the founder of all human arts through his gift of fire, and Plato here supposes that the philosophical method he describes must likewise have been due to some Prometheus, perhaps under the influence of Philolaus’ own allusion to Prometheus in his cosmology (see 4.2 above). There is no need to introduce Pythagoras into the story (Huffman 1999).  Philolaus’  metaphysics of limiters and unlimiteds is perfectly intelligible as a response to the problems raised in the tradition of Presocratic metaphysics (see 2.1 above) and was not a gift either of Prometheus or Pythagoras. Some have argued that other passages in the Phaedo (101b10–104c9) and a passage in the Cratylus (401b11–c7) show that Plato was both heavily influenced by and critical of Philolaus (Horky 2013). However, neither Philolaus nor the Pythagoreans are specifically mentioned in these passages and the supposed connections to Philolaus are nothing like as specific as in the Philebus and too general and indirect to be convincing (e.g., the concepts of odd and even in the Phaedo passage were important to Philolaus but hardly limited to him).