Aristaeus the Pythagorean on Harmony and the Cosmos

The surviving text is a Doric Pythagorean excerpt On harmony, quoted by Stobaeus 1.20.6 and printed in the Åbo collection of the Pythagorean texts of the Hellenistic period (1965), pp. 52–53. It argues that the first principle is ungenerated and that the cosmos is everlasting.

Iamblichus names Aristaeus son of Damophon of Croton as Pythagoras’s successor and the husband of Theano. He is dated, uncertainly, to the third to second century BCE. That is a Hellenistic Pythagorean persona, not a proof of a fifth-century autograph.

This is not the rustic culture-hero, son of Apollo and Cyrene, and not Aristaeus the Elder of the conic sections in Pappus. The Greek here is the treatise on harmony quoted by Stobaeus.