The History of Pythagorean Silence

Pythagoras and Pythagoreans seem to have had strong differences from Plato's thought in terms of first principles. For our biographers, on the other hand, Pythagoras basically held the tenets of what they took to be Plato's metaphysics. The Akusmata are read as having esoteric philosophical subtexts to do with metaphysics; at the same time, explorers of the realms of the mathematical.