Philolaus

Philolaus of Crotona, pupil of Pythagoras, is the man through whom the school's secret doctrines reached the outside world — Plato himself is said to have acquired his book, and from it to have drawn the Timaeus. He taught that the earth moves in a circle and that harmony and necessity generate everything, making him one of the earliest to put the heavens in motion rather than fix them in place. Yet Crotona executed him on suspicion of plotting tyranny, a death his own epigram treats as proof that innocence is no defense against a suspicious city.