Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching, and Influence

Christoph Riedweg's Pythagoras, His Life, Teaching, and Influence, translated by Steven Rendall and published by Cornell University Press in 2005, is a scholarly biography by a classicist working through the extreme source problem Pythagoras presents, since Pythagoras himself wrote nothing and the surviving accounts of his life and teaching were composed centuries after his death and blend history with legend. Riedweg's strength is method, carefully separating what the earliest, closest in time sources actually attest from later, more elaborated legendary accretions like the golden thigh and the ability to be in two places at once. Its limit is that even Riedweg's careful sifting cannot fully recover a Pythagoras behind the legend, since no contemporary source survives at all, so any claim about what Pythagoras himself specifically taught, as opposed to what later Pythagorean tradition attributed to him, remains genuinely uncertain and the book is honest about exactly that limit throughout.