Footnote 188: The importance of the life in Laertios Diogenes lies in the fact that it gives us the story current at Alexandria before the rise of Neopythagoreanism and the promulgation of the gospel according to Apollonios of Tyana. Some of the most striking miracles of Pythagoras are related on the authority of Andron’s _Tripod_, and of Aristotle’s work on the Pythagoreans.[189] Both these treatises belong to the fourth century B.C., and are therefore untouched by Neopythagorean fancies. Further, it is only by assuming the still earlier existence of this view that we can explain the allusions of Herodotos. The Hellespontine Greeks told him that Salmoxis or Zamolxis had been a slave of Pythagoras,[190] and Salmoxis is a figure of the same class as Abaris and Aristeas. Footnote 189: Andron of Ephesos wrote a work on the Seven Wise Men, called _The Tripod_, in allusion to the well-known story. The feats ascribed to Pythagoras in the Aristotelian treatise remind us of an ecclesiastical legend. For example, he kills a deadly snake by biting it; he was seen at Kroton and Metapontion at the same time; he exhibited his golden thigh at Olympia, and was addressed by a voice from heaven when crossing the river Kasas. The same authority stated that he was identified by the Krotoniates with Apollo Hyperboreios (Arist. fr. 186). Footnote 190: Herod. iv. 95. It seems, then, that both the oldest and the latest accounts agree in representing Pythagoras as a man of the class to which Epimenides and Onomakritos belonged—in fact, as a sort of “medicine-man”; but, for some reason, there was an attempt to save his memory from this imputation, and that attempt belonged to the fourth century B.C. The significance of this will appear in the sequel. [Sidenote: Life of Pythagoras.] 38. We may be said to know for certain that Pythagoras passed his early manhood at Samos, and was the son of Mnesarchos;[191] and he “flourished,” we are told, in the reign of Polykrates.[192] This date cannot be far wrong; for Herakleitos already speaks of him in the past tense.[193] Footnote 191: