[Xenophanes bears witness] in an elegy to him [= Pythagoras] having been different people at different times;[1] and they say that once he was passing while a puppy was being abused and he took pity and said, 'Stop, don't thrash him, since it is the soul of a friend that I recognized talking as I listened.' Cratinus also mocked him in Pythagoress [Pythagorizousa]. And in Tarentines [Tarantinoi] [he writes]: 'it's their custom, if they catch some layman entering, to test the power of his words, to rattle and confound him cleverly with opposites, with definitions, with balanced clauses, with fallacies, with sublimities.'[2]