The Golden Verses of Pythagoras parted early into dust (that seems strange, if they were ever really written in a book) and antiquity itself knows little directly about his doctrine. Yet Pythagoras is much more than a mere name, a term, for locating as well as may be a philosophical abstraction. Pythagoras, his person, his memory, attracted from the first a kind of fairy-tale of mystic science. The philosophy of number, of music and proportion, came, and has remained, in a cloud of legendary glory; the gradual accumulation of which Porphyry and Iamblichus, the fantastic masters of Neo-Platonism, or Neo-Pythagoreanism, have embodied in their so-called Lives of him, like some antique fable richly embossed with starry wonders. In this spirit there had been much writing about him: that he was a son of Apollo, nay, Apollo himself--the twilight, attempered, Hyperborean Apollo, like the sun in Lapland: that his person gleamed at times with a supernatural brightness: that he had exposed to those who loved him a golden thigh: how Abaris, the minister of that god, [54] had come flying to him on a golden arrow: of his almost impossible journeys: how he was seen, had lectured indeed, in different places at the same time. As he walked on the banks of the Nessus the river had whispered his name: he had been, in the secondary sense, various persons in the course of ages; a courtesan once, for some ancient sin in him; and then a hero, Euphorbus, son of Panthus; could remember very distinctly so recent a matter as the Trojan war, and had recognised in a moment his own old armour, hanging on the wall, above one of his old dead bodies, in the temple of Athene at Argos; showing out all along only by hints and flashes the abysses of divine knowledge within him, sometimes by miracle. For if the philosopher really is all that Pythagoras or the Pythagoreans suppose; if the material world is so perfect a musical instrument, and he knows its theory so well, he might surely give practical and sensible proof of that on occasion, by himself improvising music upon it in direct miracle. And so there, in Porphyry and Iamblichus, the appropriate miracles are.