ABSTRACT
This chapter interprets some fragments that show how Aristoxenus worked as a biographer, taking into account the problems arising from indirect transmission. The Negative Assessment of Aristoxenus' Biographies in modern scholarship is highly influenced by the verdict pronounced by Friedrich Leo more than a hundred years ago. The chapter looks at a series of fragments from Aristoxenus' biographies in order to reevaluate the way he worked. It compares the outcome with the methods used by other early Hellenistic biographers. The Platonist Plutarch would hardly have the Platonist Theon praise in such a manner a work that was hostile towards Socrates and Plato or that was a crude encomiastic biography of Pythagoras, in which the hero is presented as the only philosophical ideal at the expense of all other philosophers. For the biographies of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, Neanthes used literary, archaeological and oral sources of mostly Pythagorean origin.
