  A third source of evidence for early Greek philosophy is regarded with great skepticism by most scholars and, in the case of most early Greek philosophers, used only with great caution. This is the biographical tradition represented by the Lives of the Philosophers written by Diogenes Laertius. In this case we at first sight appear to be in luck, at least with regard to the amount of evidence for Pythagoras, since, as we have seen, two major accounts of the life of Pythagoras and the Pythagorean way of life survive in addition to Diogenes’ life. Unfortunately, these two additional lives are written by authors (Iamblichus and Porphyry) whose goal is explicitly non-historical, and all three of the lives rely heavily on authors in the Neopythagorean tradition, whose goal was to show that all later Greek philosophy, insofar as it was true, had been stolen from Pythagoras. There are, however, some sections in these three lives that derive from sources that go back beyond the distorting influence of Neopythagoreanism, to sources in the fourth-century BCE, sources which are also independent of the early Academy’s attempt to assign Platonic metaphysics to the Pythagoreans. The most important of these sources are the fragments of Aristotle’s lost treatises on the Pythagoreans and the fragments of works on Pythagoreanism or of works which dealt in passing with Pythagoreanism written by Aristotle’s pupils Dicaearchus and Aristoxenus, in the second half of the fourth century BCE. The historian Timaeus of Tauromenium (ca. 350–260 BCE), who wrote a history of Sicily, which included material on southern Italy where Pythagoras was active, is also important. In some cases, the fragments of these early works are clearly identified in the later lives, but in other cases we may suspect that they are the source of a given passage without being able to be certain. Large problems remain even in the case of these sources. They were all written 150–250 years after the death of Pythagoras; given the lack of written evidence for Pythagoras, they are based largely on oral traditions. Aristoxenus, who grew up in the southern Italian town of Tarentum, where the Pythagorean Archytas was the dominant political figure, and who was himself a Pythagorean before joining Aristotle’s school, undoubtedly had a rich set of oral traditions upon which to draw. It is clear, nonetheless, that 150 years after his death conflicting traditions regarding Pythagoras’ beliefs had arisen on even the most central issues. Thus, Aristoxenus is emphatic that Pythagoras was not a strict vegetarian and ate a number of types of meat (Diogenes Laertius VIII. 20), whereas Aristoxenus’ contemporary, the mathematician Eudoxus, portrays him not only as avoiding all meat but as even refusing to associate with butchers (Porphyry, VP 7). Even among fourth-century authors that had at least some pretensions to historical accuracy and who had access to the best information available, there are widely divergent presentations, simply because such contradictions were endemic to the evidence available in the fourth century. What we can hope to obtain from the evidence presented by Aristotle, Aristoxenus, Dicaearchus, and Timaeus is thus not a picture of Pythagoras that is consistent in all respects but rather a picture that at least defines the main areas of his achievement. This picture can then be tested by the most fundamental evidence of all, the testimony of authors that precede even Aristotle, testimony in some cases that derives from Pythagoras’ own contemporaries. This testimony is extremely limited, about twenty brief references, but this dearth of evidence is not unique to Pythagoras.  The pre-Aristotelian testimony for Pythagoras is more extensive than for most other early Greek philosophers and is thus testimony to his fame.