Pythagorean Secret Cult: Democratic or Dictatorial

That Pythagoras founded an utopic, elitist, puritanical cult is proved by the fact that his communes were burned by the pitchfork peasantry of Ancient Greece, and that he was persecuted. He is on my mind as I am re-reading "The end of Sparta" by Victor Davis Hanson, a novel where the revolutionary democratic ideas of Pythagoras fuel the Boiotians' onslaught on Sparta - to free the Messenian helots and spread democracy. Hanson's central thesis hits me as paradoxical because in the original history, it was the democratic party of Croton that persecuted Pythagoras for teaching tyranny. Yet his followers lived in closed, secret communes, everything in common, that is, they were the first Communists. Hanson knows of Greece more than I do, yet something seems wrong. 

We know that Pythagoras  invented the metempsychosis, or the "transmigration of souls", which holds that the soul is immortal and, upon death, enters into a new body. They believed that numbers - the numerability - was the underlying principle of the universe, which seems to be so. The sect followed bizarre customs, such as taking a wow of silence, putting on the right sandal before the left one, not wearing wool textiles, vegetarianism except eating beans, erecting tombstones in life and so. Pythagoras was a math and music genius, he invented an equation that I understood only at age six.