A Rule of Silence and a Shared Purse

The doctrine most securely attested for Pythagoras himself is transmigration, and the best early witness is a joke: Xenophanes, writing within living memory, has him beg a man to stop beating a puppy because he recognised a friend's voice in its yelp. Around that doctrine the later sources describe a community at Croton organised as a way of life rather than a school. Candidates reportedly passed years of probationary silence before admission. Property was held in common, and the phrase friends hold all things in common was remembered as Pythagorean before it was Platonic. Teaching circulated as akousmata, short sayings to be memorised rather than argued with: abstain from beans, do not poke the fire with a sword, do not break bread. Ancient writers already disagreed about whether these were literal taboos or coded ethics, and that disagreement is itself part of the record.

Women were admitted, and Theano is named among the members, though everything specific about her is late. The community's political weight in Croton ended badly: meeting houses were burned and members killed in risings that the sources place around the end of the sixth century BCE, and the survivors scattered. Every detail above reaches us through writers centuries removed, chiefly Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry and Iamblichus, and each is best read as what the tradition wanted its founder's life to have been.