Pythagoras Wrote Nothing, and a Forged Library Claimed Plato and Aristotle Drew Their Key Ideas From Him
Pythagoras himself wrote nothing, so what we know of his views comes entirely from other people's reports. The first detailed accounts of him were written about 150 years after his death, and only fragments of them have survived; those accounts disagreed with one another on significant points.
By the end of the first century BCE, a large collection of books had been forged in the name of Pythagoras and other early Pythagoreans, purporting to be the original Pythagorean texts from which Plato and Aristotle derived their most important ideas. A forged library that claims Plato and Aristotle got their key ideas from it is an argument by ancestry—and one that does not require its supposed author to have written a word.
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By the third century CE, when the first detailed accounts that survive intact were written, Pythagoras had come to be regarded in some circles as the master philosopher from whom all that was true in the Greek philosophical tradition derived. That is an inheritance problem as much as a biography problem: the heirs are writing the will.
Writing nothing may be the most durable career move available to a thinker: leave no book of your own, and every account of you has to come from someone else. Leave a book and someone can always open it and disagree with you.