Attribution, Date and the Commentary That Carried It

Nobody holds that Pythagoras composed these lines. He is not credited with writings by the earliest sources that discuss him, the poem's language belongs to a much later stage of Greek than the sixth century BCE, and its contents draw together precepts of the kind that circulated in the school over a long period. What is disputed is when the collection took the form we have, and the range proposed by scholars is wide enough that the question is better treated as open than as settled toward either end. The poem's later career is largely due to a commentary.

Hierocles of Alexandria, teaching Platonic philosophy in the fifth century, took the verses as the elementary stage of philosophical training and expounded them at length, which gave them a place in a Neoplatonic curriculum and ensured they were copied alongside serious philosophical works rather than as a curiosity. Through that channel they reached the Renaissance already framed as an initiation into philosophy, and the humanists who translated them received both the poem and Hierocles's reading of it. Modern esoteric use of the verses generally descends from that reception rather than from any independent line back to the ancient school.