Bonnie and I were e-chatting about the pros and cons of posting family legends on the internet because of the dangers of perpetuating myths without proper documentation, and she replied with this most intelligent response which she has given me permission to post. So I am very happy to share her comments with you: I was researching through a couple of books and found the following excerpts helpful when daunted by the task of authentically interpreting family history, especially the value of traditional family accounts. Arnold Hermann writes in his book, To Think Like God: Pythagoras and Parmenides, that [P31] "to present a reliable account of Pythagoras' life, death, and the ... revolts, is an almost impossible task. This is certainly not due to a lack of available testimony; on the contrary, we seem flooded with far too many versions of the same events. If we take only the circumstance of how Pythagoras' death relates to the uprisings, we are confronted with the following, often contradictory testimony: * Pythagoras was in Croton during the revolt. * No, he was not present because he foresaw the coming difficulties and managed to move quietly to Metapontum. * No, not only was he present, but he was inside a burning Pythagorean meetinghouse and just barely escaped. * No, he was not in the meetinghouse, but he was in Croton, where he fled to the harbor, subsequently traveling from city to city in desperate search for shelter, only to be turned away repeatedly.. * No, he went only as far as a field of beans, where he was caught. * No, he made it to Metapontum, but starved to death in the Temple of the Muses, beleaguered by his foes. * No, he refused to eat on purpose, being heartbroken over the terrible fate of his followers. * [P32] * No, that is not the way he died; he had his throat cut after being captured near the field of beans. * No, he was not even in Italy at that time, having journeyed abroad to take care of his old teacher, who was sill. * No, his teacher had passed away a long time ago, and Pythagoras had moved to Metapontum some twenty years before these difficulties emerged. * No, Pythagoras himself was long dead when all this transpired. * And so on. These conflicting versions have come to be called the "traditional account" of Pythagoras' fate--that is, traditional as opposed to historical. ... A traditional account need not differentiate between verifiable events, legend and lore, and the "improvements" by subsequent writers. It need only pass on whatever stories were typical at the time on a given subject, usually those individual anecdotes that were most memorable." According to Hermann [P34], there are six principal sources for the Pythagorean tradition. Three are from the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. and the other three are much later and belong to the 2nd and 3rd centuries B.C.E. Hermann further states that [P36] "the reliability of all of these sources was compromised by the great time span that separated them from the actual events, a time span that even by the most optimistic estimates was still one and a half to two centuries; hence, we have no reason to believe that any of these authors were able to distinguish between actual history and what already [P37] had become accepted tradition. And if we have such difficulties with our earliest sources, one can imagine how hard it is to sort out the intricate accounts of our other group of biographers, who wrote some six centuries later ..." "Unfortunately, it is only the lack of better source material that has turned these often questionable accounts into authoritative works...." Hermann quotes Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism [P100, P117], "One is tempted to say that there is not a single detail in the life of Pythagoras that stands uncontradicted. It is possible, from a more or less critical selection of the data, to construct a plausible account; but it is bound to rest on shaky foundations, for no documentary evidence has appeared. ... No [ancient] author seems to use documentary evidence; everything depends on oral tradition. ..." In other words, oral traditions can be archived as just what they are, as traditions handed down from generation to generation, "usually those individual anecdotes that were most memorable." [Hermann. P32] On the other hand, a well documented and authentically interpreted historical account stands on its own merits. In his historical-critical account of Pythagoras, Hermann [P279] writes about how to transform raw data, remarks, bits of lore--info--to reliable knowledge. "The goal of the sequence is to establish or attain certainty. The sequence is subdivided into five sections, each one marking a specific state of affairs or phase of actions. The sequence begins with a sort of */first contact /*with our subject, in which we take notice or become aware of a piece of information--a bit of lore, for example. [Hermann refers to this sequence as */info /*stage] The accumulated data are then whittled down through various steps, such as from */possible/* to */probable/*, then further reduced to what can be */confirmed /*or authenticated, and lastly, the remainder may be classified as */certain./*" In other words, INFO > POSSIBLE > PROBABLE > CONFIRMED > CERTAINTY. Hermann elaborates on each one of the five sequences on pages 280-281. Then he goes through every piece of info known about Pythagoras and classifies each using his INFO to CERTAINTY sequence. ~Bonnie