Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Philolaus of Croton, a Pythagorean. Plato writes to Dion to purchase the Pythagorean books from him. He met his end having been suspected of aiming at a tyranny. We have an epigram on him as follows: "I bid all men above all to guard against suspicion; for even if you do not do the deed, yet seem to, you are undone. Even so did his native Croton once destroy Philolaus, when he seemed to wish to possess a tyrant's dwelling."

​He holds that all things come to be by necessity and harmony; and he is said to have been the first to declare that the earth moves in a circle, though some say it was Hicetas of Syracuse. He wrote one book, which Hermippus says a certain writer relates that Plato the philosopher, when he came to Sicily to Dionysius, bought from the relatives of Philolaus for forty Alexandrian minas of silver, and from it transcribed the *Timaeus*. Others say that Plato received the books after begging off from Dionysius a youth among Philolaus' disciples who had been led away to prison. Demetrius says in his *Men of the Same Name* that he was the first of the Pythagoreans to publish books and entitle them *On Nature*, of which the beginning is this: "Nature in the cosmos was fitted together from both unlimiteds and limiters, both the whole cosmos and all things in it."