XV

STUDENTS AND REPUTATION

He was so greatly admired that it used to be said that his disciples looked on all his sayings as the Oracles of God. In his writings he himself said that he had come among men after having spent two hundred and seventy years in the shades below. Therefore the Lucanians, Peucetians, Messapians and Romans flocked around him, coming with eagerness to hear his discourses; but until the time of Philolaus no doctrines of Pythagoras were ever divulged; and he was the first person who published the three celebrated books which Plato wrote to have purchased for him for a hundred minae. The scholars who used to come to him by night were [no] less than six hundred. Whenever any one of them [was] permitted to see him, he wrote of it to his friends, as if they had achieved something wonderful. The people of Metapontum used to call his house the temple of Ceres; and the street leading to it was called that of the Muses, as we are informed in the universal history of Phavorinus.

According to the account given by Aristoxenus, in his tenth book of his Laws on Education, the rest of the Pythagoreans used to say that his precepts ought not to be divulged to all the world; and Xenophilus the Pythagorean, when he was asked what was the best way for a man to educate his son, said, "That he must first of all take care that he was born in a city which enjoyed good laws." Pythagoras formed many excellent men in Italy, by his precepts, and among them Zaleucus and Charondas, the lawgivers.