The Golden Verses of Pythagoras

The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, attributed to Pythagoras and translated by Nayan Louise Redfield, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1917 and read here from the Project Gutenberg public-domain edition, presents a short collection of ethical maxims that later Pythagorean and Neoplatonic tradition attributed to Pythagoras himself, though the text as it survives was almost certainly composed well after his lifetime by followers of the tradition. Its strength is that it is a widely available English translation of a text central to how later antiquity remembered Pythagorean ethical teaching. Its limit is both the attribution and the translation's age: the verses' actual authorship is not Pythagoras's own, a point scholarship on the Pythagorean tradition treats as settled, and Redfield's 1917 English should be checked against a modern critical edition for any claim resting on precise wording.