In the modern world Pythagoras is the most famous of the early Greek philosophers. The same was true in the fourth century B.C., when Plato wrote his Republic, some 150 years after Pythagoras left Samos in about 530, to emigrate to Croton in southern Italy, where Pythagoreanism would flourish. Plato has Socrates say that Pythagoras was “especially loved as a leader of education in the private sphere,” and that his followers

However, beginning with Plato's successors in the Academy, the reputation of Pythagoras became seriously exaggerated, and by the fourth century A.D. in the Neoplatonic tradition, he had become the greatest of all philosophers, from whom both Plato and Aristotle borrowed their central ideas.