Ancient Greek / Roman historical interpretation QUESTIONED !

HOW FAR CAN WE 'TRUST' Ancient Greek / Roman historical interpretation done by (mostly) pre-Christian Pagan (Western) scholars ? Many so-called 'Loop-hole or mismatch or misinterpretation or subtle Plagiarism' seems evident : 1. Pythagoras wrote nothing, nor were there any detailed accounts of his thought written by contemporaries. By the first centuries BCE, moreover, it became fashionable to present Pythagoras in a largely unhistorical fashion as a semi-divine figure, who originated all that was true in the Greek philosophical tradition, including many of Plato’s and Aristotle’s mature ideas. A number of treatises were forged in the name of Pythagoras and other Pythagoreans in order to support this view. 2. In reconstructing the thought of early Greek philosophers, scholars often turn to Aristotle’s and Plato’s accounts of their predecessors, although Plato’s accounts are embedded in the literary structure of his dialogues and thus do not pretend to historical accuracy, while Aristotle’s apparently more historical presentation masks a considerable amount of reinterpretation of his predecessors’ views in terms of his own thought. 3. Herodotus tells the story of the Thracian Zalmoxis, who taught his countrymen that they would never die but instead go to a place where they would eternally possess all good things (IV. 95). Among the Greeks the tradition arose that this Zalmoxis was the slave of Pythagoras. Herodotus himself thinks that Zalmoxis lived long before Pythagoras, but the Greeks’ willingness to portray Zalmoxis as Pythagoras’ slave shows that they thought of Pythagoras as the expert from whom Zalmoxis derived his teaching. Are we to conclude, then, that Pythagoras had nothing to do with mathematics or cosmology? 4. It is striking that a very similar picture of Pythagoras emerges from the evidence for his cosmology. #Indonordicassociation(dot)org https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/