CHAPTER LVIII (58).

IONIC PHILOSOPHERS— PYTHAGORAS. — KROTON AND SYBARIS

 

The history of the powerful Grecian cities in Italy and Sicily, between the accession of Peisistratus and the battle of Marathon, is for the most part unknown to us. Phalaris, despot of Agrigentum in Sicily, made for himself an unenviable name during this obscure interval. His reign seems to coincide in time with the earlier part of the rule of Peisistratus (about 560-540 BC), and the few and vague statements which we find respecting it, merely show us that it was a period of extortion and cruelty, even beyond the ordinary license of Grecian despots. The reality of the hollow bull of brass, which Phalaris was accustomed to heat in order to shut up his victims in it and burn them, appears to be better authenticated than the nature of the story would lead us to presume: for it is not only noticed by Pindar, but even the actual instrument of this torture, the brazen bull itself,—which had been taken away from Agrigentum as a trophy by the Carthaginians when they captured the town, was restored by the Romans, on the subjugation of Carthage, to its original domicile. Phalaris is said to have acquired the supreme command, by undertaking the task of building a great temple to Zeus Polieus on the citadel rock; a pretence whereby he was enabled to assemble and arm a number of workmen and devoted partisans, whom be employed, at the festival of the Thesmophoria, to put down the authorities. He afterwards disarmed the citizens by a stratagem, and committed cruelties which rendered him so abhorred, that a sudden rising of the people, headed by Telemachus (ancestor of the subsequent despot, Thero), overthrew and slew him. A severe revenge was taken on his partisans after his fall.

During the interval between 540-500 bc, events of much importance occurred among the Italian Greeks,—especially at Kroton and Sybaris,—events, unhappily, very imperfectly handed down. Between these two periods fall both the war between Sybaris and Kroton, and the career and ascendency of Pythagoras. In connection with this latter name, it will be requisite to say a few words respecting the other Grecian philosophers of the sixth century bc.

 

 

I have, in a former chapter, noticed and characterized those distinguished persons called the Seven Wise Men of Greece, whose celebrity falls in the first half of this century,—men not so much marked by scientific genius as by practical sagacity and foresight in the appreciation of worldly affairs, and enjoying a high degree of political respect from their fellow-citizens. Out of them, however, the Milesian Thales, claims our notice, not only on this ground, but also as the earliest known name in the long line of Greek scientific investigators. His life, nearly contemporary with that of Solon, belongs seemingly to the interval about 610-550 bc: the stories mentioned in Herodotus— perhaps borrowed in part from the Milesian Hecataeus—are sufficient to show that his reputation for wisdom, as well as for science, continued to be very great, even a century after his death, among his fellow-citizens. And he marks an important epoch in the progress of the Greek mind, as having been the first man to depart both in letter and spirit from the Hesiodic Theogony, introducing the conception of substances with their transformations and sequences, in place of that string of persons and quasi-human attributes which had animated the old legendary world. He is the father of what is called the Ionic philosophy, which is considered as lasting from his time down to that of Sokrates; and writers, ancient as well as modern, have professed to trace a succession of philosophers, each one the pupil of the. preceding, between these two extreme epochs. B it the appellation is, in truth, undefined, and even incorrect, since nothing entitled to the name of a school, or sect, or succession,—like that of the Pythagoreans, to be noticed presently,—can be made out. There is, indeed, a certain general analogy in the philosophical vein of Thales, Hippo, Anaximenes, and Diogenes of Apollonia, whereby they all stand distinguished from Xenophanes of Elea, and his successors, the Eleatic dialecticians, Parmenides and Zeno; but there are also material differences Bet ween their respective doctrines,—no two of them holding the same. And if we look to Anaximander, the person next in order of time to Thales, as well as to Heraclitus, we find them departing, in a great degree, even from that character which all the rest have in common, though both the one and the other are usually enrolled in the list of Ionic philosophers.

Of the old legendary and polytheistic conception of nature, which Thales partially discarded, we may remark that it is a state of the human mind in which the problems suggesting themselves to be solved, and the machinery for solving them, bear a fair proportion one to the other. If the problems be vast, indeterminate, confused, and derived rather from the hopes, fears, love, hatred, astonishment, etc., of men, than from any genuine desire of knowledge,—so also does the received belief supply invisible agents in unlimited number, and with every variety of power and inclination. The means of explanation are thus multiplied and diversified as readily as the phenomena to be explained. And though no future events or states can be predicted on trustworthy grounds, in such manner as to stand the scrutiny of subsequent verification,—yet there is little difficulty in rendering a specious and plausible account of matters past, of any and all things alike; especially as. at such a period, matters of fact requiring explanation are neither collated nor preserved with care. And though no event or state, which has not yet occurred, can be predicted, there is little difficulty in rendering a plausible account of everything which has occurred in the past. Cosmogony, and the prior ages of the world, were conceived as a sort of personal history, with intermarriages, filiation, quarrels, and other adventures, of these invisible agents; among whom some one or more were assumed as unbegotten and self-existent—the latter assumption being a difficulty common to all systems of cosmogony, and from which even this flexible and expansive hypothesis is not exempt.

Now when Thales disengaged Grecian philosophy from the old mode of explanation, he did not at the same time disengage it from the old problems and matters propounded for inquiry. These he retained, and transmitted to his successors, as vague and vast as they were at first conceived; and so they remained, though with some transformations and modifications, together with many new questions equally insoluble, substantially present to the Greeks throughout their whole history, as the legitimate problems for philosophical investigation. But these problems, adapted only to the old elastic system of polytheistic explanation and omnipresent personal agency, became utterly disproportioned to any impersonal hypotheses such as those of Thales and the philosophers after him,—whether assumed physical laws, or plausible moral and metaphysical dogmas, open to argumentative attack, and of course requiring the like defence. To treat the visible world as a whole, and inquire when and how it began, as well as into all its past changes,—to discuss the first origin of men, animals, plants, the sun, the stars, etc.,—to assign some comprehensive reason why motion or change in general took place in the universe,—to investigate the destinies of the human race, and to lay down some systematic relation between them and the gods,—all these were topics admitting of being conceived in many different ways, and set forth with eloquent plausibility, but not reducible to any solution either resting on scientific evidence, or commanding steady adherence under a free scrutiny.

At the time when the power of scientific investigation was scanty and helpless, the problems proposed were thus such as to lie out of the reach of science in its largest compass. Gradually, indeed, subjects more special and limited, and upon which experience, or deductions from experience, could be brought to bear, were added to the list of quaesita, and examined with great profit and instruction: but the old problems, with new ones, alike unfathomable, were never eliminated, and always occupied a prominent place in the philosophical world. Now it was this disproportion, between questions Io be solved and means of solution, which gave rise to that conspicuous characteristic of Greek philosophy,—the antagonist force of suspensive skepticism, passing in some minds into a broad negation of the attainability of general truth, —which it nourished from its beginning to its end; commencing as early as Xenophanes, continuing to manifest itself seven centuries afterwards in Aenesidemus and Sextus Empiricus, and including in the interval between these two extremes some of the most powerful intellects in Greece. The present is not the time for considering these Skeptics, who bear an unpopular name, and have not often been fairly appreciated; the more so, as it often suited the purpose of men, themselves essentially skeptical, like Socrates and Plato, to denounce professed skepticism with indignation. But it is essential to bring them into notice at the first spring of Greek philosophy under Thales, because the circumstances were then laid which so soon afterwards developed them.

Though the celebrity of Thales in antiquity was great and universal, scarcely any distinct facts were known respecting him: it is certain that he left nothing in writing. Extensive travels in Egypt and Asia arc ascribed to him, and as a general fact these travels are doubtless true, since no other means of acquiring knowledge were then open. At a time when the brother of the Lesbian Alkaeus was serving in the Babylonian army, we may easily conceive that an inquisitive Milesian would make his way to that wonderful city wherein stood the temple­observatory of the Chaldean priesthood; nor is it impossible that he may have seen the still greater city of Ninus, or Nineveh, before its capture and destruction by the Medes. How great his reputation was in his lifetime, the admiration expressed by his younger contemporary, Xenophanes, assures us; and Herakleitus, in the next generation; a severe judge of all other philosophers, spoke of him with similar esteem. To him were traced, by the Grecian inquirers of the fourth century BC, the first beginnings of geometry, astronomy, and physiology in its large and really appropriate sense, the scientific study of nature: for the Greek word denoting nature (φύσις), first comes into comprehensive use about this time (as I have remarked in an earlier chapter), with its derivatives physics and physiology, as distinguished from the theology of the old poets. Little stress can be laid on those elementary propositions in geometry which are specified as discovered, or as first demonstrated, by Thales,—still less upon the solar eclipse respecting which, according to Herodotus, he determined beforehand the year of occurrence. But the main doctrine of his physiology,—using that word in its larger Greek sense,—is distinctly attested. He stripped Oceanus and Tethys, primeval parents of the gods in the Homeric theogony, of their personality,—and laid down water, or fluid substance, as the single original element from which everything came, and into which everything returned. The doctrine of one eternal element, remaining always the same in its essence, but indefinitely variable in its manifestations to sense, was thus first introduced to the discussion of the Greek public. We have no means of knowing the reasons by which Thales supported this opinion, nor could even Aristotle do more than conjecture what they might have been; but one of the statements urged on behalf of it,—that the earth itself rested on water,—we may safely refer to the Milesian himself, for it would hardly have been advanced at a later age. Moreover, Thales is reported to have held, that everything was living and full of gods; and that the magnet, especially, was a living thing. Thus the gods, as far as we can pretend to follow opinions so very faintly transmitted, are conceived as active powers, and causes of changeful manifestation, attached to the primeval substance: the universe being assimilated to an organized body or system.

Respecting Hippo,—who reproduced the theory of Thales under a more generalized form of expression, substituting, in place of water, moisture, or something common to air and water,—we do not know whether he belonged to the sixth or the fifth century bc. But Anaximander, Xenophanes, and Pherecydes belong to the latter half of the sixth century. Anaximander, the son of Praxiades, was a native of Miletus,— Xenophanes, a native of Kolophon; the former, among the earliest expositors of doctrine in prose, while the latter committed his opinions to the old medium of verse. Anaximander seems to have taken up the philosophical problem, while he materially altered the hypothesis of his predecessor Thales. Instead of the primeval fluid of the latter, he supposed a primeval principle, without any actual determining qualities whatever, but including all qualities potentially, and manifesting them in an infinite variety from its continually self-changing nature,—a principle, which was nothing in itself, yet had the capacity of producing any and all manifestations, however contrary to each other,—a primeval something, whose essence it was to be eternally productive of different phenomena, a sort of mathematical point, which counts for nothing in itself, but is vigorous in generating lines to any extent that may be desired. In this manner, Anaximander professed to give a comprehensive explanation of change in general, or generation, or destruction,—how it happened that one sensible thing began and another ceased to exist,—according to the vague problems which these early inquirers were in the habit of setting to themselves. He avoided that which the first philosophers especially dreaded, the affirmation that generation could take place out of Nothing; yet the primeval Something, which he supposed was only distinguished from noting by possessing this very power of generation.

In his theory, he passed from the province of physics into that of metaphysics. He first introduced into Greek philosophy that important word which signifies a beginning or a principle, and first opened that metaphysical discussion, which was carried on in various ways throughout the whole period of Greek philosophy, as to the one and the many—the continuous and the variable—that which exists eternally, ai distinguished from that which comes and passes away in ever-changing manifestations. His physiology, or explanation of nature, thus conducted the mind into a different route from that suggested by the hypothesis of Thales, which was built upon physical considerations, and was therefore calculated to suggest and stimulate observations of physical phenomena for the purpose of verifying or confuting it,—while the hypothesis of Anaximander admitted only of being discussed dialectically, or by reasonings expressed in general language; reasonings sometimes, indeed, referring to experience for the purpose of illustration, but seldom resting on it, and never looking out for it as a necessary support. The physical expla­nation of nature, however, once introduced by Thales, although deserted by Anaximander, was taken up by Anaximenes and others afterwards, and reproduced with many divergences of doctrine,—yet always more or less entangled and perplexed with metaphysical additions, since the two departments were never clearly parted throughout all Grecian philosophy. Of these subsequent physical philosophers I shall speak hereafter: at present, I confine myself to the thinkers of the sixth century bc, among whom Anaximander stands prominent, not as the follower of Thales, but as the author of an hypothesis both new and tending in a different direction.

It was not merely as the author of this hypothesis, however, that Anaximander enlarged the Greek mind and roused the powers of thought: we find him also mentioned as distinguished in astronomy and geometry. He is said to have been the first to establish a sun-dial in Greece, to construct a sphere, and to explain the obliquity of the ecliptic; how far such alleged author­ship really belongs to him, we cannot be certain,—but there is one step of immense importance which he is clearly affirmed to have made. He was the first to compose a treatise on the geography of the land and sea within his cognizance, and to construct a chart or map founded thereupon,—seemingly a tablet of brass. Such a novelty, wondrous even to the rude and ignorant, was calculated to stimulate powerfully inquisitive minds, and from it may be dated the commencement of Grecian rational geography,—not the least valuable among the contributions of this people Io the stock of human knowledge.

Xenophanes of Kolophon, somewhat younger than Anaximander, and nearly contemporary with Pythagoras (seemingly from about 570-480 bc), migrated from Kolophon to Zankle and Katana in Sicily and Elea in Italy, soon after the time when Ionia became subject to the Persians, (540-530 bc). He was the founder of what is called the Eleatic school of philosophers,—areal school, since it appears that Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus, pursued and developed, in a great degree, the train of speculation which had been begun by Xenophanes, —doubtless with additions and variations of their own, but especially with a dialectic power which belongs to the age of Pericles, and is unknown in the sixth century BC. He was the author of more than one poem of considerable length, one on the foundation of Kolophon and another on that of Elea; besides his poem on Nature, wherein his philosophical doctrines were set forth. His manner appears to have been controversial and full of asperity towards antagonists; but what is most remarkable is the plain-spoken manner in which he declared himself against the popular religion, and in which he denounced as abominable the descriptions of the gods given by Homer and Hesiod.

He is said to have controverted the doctrines both of Thales and Pythagoras: this is probable enough; but he seems to have taken his start from the philosophy of Anaximander,—not, however, to adopt it, but to reverse it,—and to set forth an opinion which we may call its contrary. Nature, in the conception of Anaximander, consisted of a Something having no other attribute except the unlimited power of generating and cancelling phenomenal changes: in tins doctrine, the something or substratum existed only in and for those changes, and could not be said to exist at all in any other sense: the permanent was thus merged and lost in the variable,—the one in the many. Xenophanes laid down the exact opposite: he conceived Nature as one unchangeable and indivisible whole, spherical, animated, endued with reason, and penetrated by or indeed identical with God: he denied the objective reality of all change, or generation, or destruction, which he seems to have considered as only changes or modifications in the percipient, and perhaps different in one percipient and another. That which exists, he maintained, could not have been generated, nor could it ever be destroyed: there was neither real generation nor real destruction of anything; but that which men took for such, was the change in their own feelings and ideas. He thus recognized the permanent without the variable,—the one without the many. And his treatment of the received religious creed was in harmony with such physical or metaphysical hypothesis; for while he held the whole of Nature to be God, without parts or change, he at the same time pronounced the popular gods to be entities of subjective fancy, imagined by men after their own model: if oxen or lions were to become religious, he added, they would in like manner provide for themselves gods after their respective shapes and characters. This hypothesis, which seemed to set aside altogether the study of the sensible world as a source of knowledge, was expounded briefly, and as it should seem, obscurely and rudely, by Xenophanes; at least we may infer thus much from the slighting epithet applied to him by Aristotle. But his successors, Parmenides and Zeno, in the succeeding century, expanded it considerably, supported it with extraordinary acuteness of dialectics, and even superadded a second part, in which the phenomena of sense— though considered only as appearances, not partaking in the reality of the one Ens—were yet explained by a new physical hypothesis; so that they will be found to exercise great influence over the speculations both of Plato and Aristotle. We discover in Xenophanes, moreover, a vein of skepticism, and a mournful despair as to the attainability of certain knowledge, which the nature of his philosophy was well calculated to suggest, and in which the sillograph Timon of the third century BC, who seems to have spoken of Xenophanes better than of most of the other philosophers, powerfully sympathized.

The cosmogony of Pherecydes of Syrus, contemporary of Anaximander and among the teachers of Pythagoras, seems, according to the fragments preserved, a combination of the old legendary fancies with Orphic mysticism, and probably exercised little influence over the subsequent course of Grecian philosophy. By what has been said of Thales. Anaximander, and Xenophanes, it will be seen that the sixth century BC witnessed the opening of several of those roads of intellectual speculation which the later philosophers pursued farther, or at least from which they branched off. Before the year 500 BC many interesting questions were thus brought into discussion, which Solon, who died about 558 BC, had never heard of,—just as he may probably never have seen the map of Anaximander. But neither of these two distinguished men— Anaximander or Xenophanes was anything more than a speculative inquirer. The third eminent name of this century, of whom I am now about to speak,—Pythagoras, combined in his character disparate elements which require rather a longer development.

Pythagoras was founder of a brotherhood, originally brought together by a religious influence, and with observances approaching to monastic peculiarity,—working in a direction at once religious, political, and scientific, and exercising for some time a real political ascendency, —but afterwards banished from government and state affairs into a sectarian privacy with scientific pursuits, not without, however, still producing some statesmen individually distinguished. Amidst the multitude of false and apocryphal statements which circulated in antiquity respecting this celebrated man, we find a few important facts reasonably attested and deserving credence, he was a native of Samos, son of an opulent merchant named Mnesarchus,—or, according to some of his later and more fervent admirers, of Apollo; born, as far as we can make out, about the 50th Olympiad, or 580 BC. On the many marvels recounted respecting his youth, it is unnecessary to dwell. Among them may be numbered his wide-reaching travels, said to have been prolonged for nearly thirty years, to visit the Arabians, the Syrians, the Phenicians, the Chaldeans, the Indians, and the Gallic Druids. But there is reason to believe that he really visited Egypt—perhaps also Phenicia—and Babylon, then Chaldean and independent. At the time when he saw Egypt, between 560-540 bc, about one century earlier than Herodotus, it was under Amasis, the last of its own kings, with its peculiar native character yet unimpaired by foreign conquest, and only slightly modified by the admission during the preceding century of Grecian mercenary troops and traders. The spectacle of Egyptian habits, the conversation of the priests, and the initiation into various mysteries or secret rites and stories not accessible to the general public, may very naturally have impressed the mind of Pythagoras, and given him that turn for mystic observance, asceticism, and peculiarity of diet and clothing,—which manifested itself from the same cause among several of his contemporaries, but which was not a common phenomenon in the primitive Greek religion. Besides visiting Egypt. Pythagoras is also said to have profited by the teaching of Thales, of Anaximander, and of Pherecydes of Syros. Amidst the towns of Ionia, he would, moreover, have an opportunity of conversing with many Greek navigators who had visited foreign countries, especially Italy and Sicily. His mind seems to have been acted upon and impelled by this combined stimulus,—partly towards an imaginative and religious vein of speculation, with a life of mystic observance,—partly towards that active exercise, both of mind and body, which the genius of an Hellenic community so naturally tended to suggest.

Of the personal doctrines or opinions of Pythagoras, whom we must distinguish from Philolaus and the subsequent Pythagoreans, we have little certain knowledge, though doubtless the first germ of their geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, etc. must have proceeded from him. But that he believed in the metempsychosis or transmigration of the souls of deceased men into other men, as well as into animals, we know, not only by other evidence, but also by the testimony of his contemporary, the philosopher Xenophanes of Elea. Pythagoras, seeing a dog beaten, and hearing him howl, desired the striker to desist, saying: “It is the soul of a friend of mine, whom I recognized by his voice.” This—together with the general testimony of Heraclitus, that Pythagoras was a man of extensive research and acquired instruction, but artful for mischief and destitute of sound judgment—is all that we know about him from contemporaries. Herodotus, two generations afterwards, while he conceives the Pythagoreans as a peculiar religious order, intimates that both Orpheus and Pythagoras had derived the doctrine of the metempsychosis from Egypt, but had pretended to it as their own without acknowledgment.

Pythagoras combines the character of a sophist (a man of large observation, and clever, ascendent, inventive mind,—the original sense of the word Sophist, prior to the polemics of the Platonic school, and the only sense known to Herodotus) with that of an inspired teacher, prophet, and worker of miracles,—approaching to and sometimes even confounded with the gods,—and employing all these gifts to found a new special order of brethren, bound together by religious rites and observances peculiar to themselves. In his prominent vocation, analogous to that of Epimenides, Orpheus, or Melampus, he appears as the revealer of a mode of life calculated to raise his disciples above the level of mankind, and to recommend them to the favor of the gods; the Pythagorean life, like the Orphic life, being intended as the exclusive prerogative of the brotherhood— approached only by probation and initiatory ceremonies which were adapted to select enthusiasts rather than to an indiscriminate crowd,—and exacting entire mental devotion to the master. In these lofty pretensions the Agrigentine Empedocles seems to have greatly copied him, though with some varieties, about half a century afterwards. While Aristotle tells us that the Krotoniates identified Pythagoras with the Hyperborean Apollo, the satirical Timon pronounced him to have been “a juggler of solemn speech, engaged in fishing for men.” This is the same character, looked at from the different points of view of the believer and the unbeliever. There is, however, no reason for regarding Pythagoras as an impostor, because experience seems to show, that while in certain ages it is not difficult for a man to persuade others that he is inspired, it is still less difficult for him to contract the same belief himself.

Looking at the general type of Pythagoras, as conceived by witnesses in and nearest to his own age,—Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Isokrates,— we find in him chiefly the religious missionary and schoolmaster, with little of the politician. His efficiency in the latter character, originally subordinate, first becomes prominent in those glowing fancies which the later Pythagoreans communicated to Aristoxenus and Dikaearchus. The primitive Pythagoras inspired by the gods to reveal a new mode of life,—the Pythagorean life,—and to promise divine favor to a select and docile few, as the recompense of strict ritual obedience, of austere self-control, and of laborious training, bodily as well as mental. To speak with confidence of the details of his training, ethical or scientific, and of the doctrines which he promulgated, is impossible; for neither he himself nor any of his disciples anterior to Philolaus—who was separated from him by about one intervening generation—left any memorials in writing. Numbers and lines, studied partly in their own mutual relations, partly under various symbolizing fancies, presented themselves to him as the primary constituent elements of the universe, and as a sort of magical key to phenomena physical as well as moral. And these mathematical tendencies in his teaching, expanded by Pythagoreans, his successors, and coinciding partly also, as has been before stated, with the studies of Anaximander and Thales, acquired more and more development, so as to become one of the most glorious and profitable manifestations of Grecian intellect. Living as Pythagoras did at a time when the stock of experience was scanty, the license of hypothesis unbounded, and the process of deduction without rule or verifying test,—he was thus fortunate enough to strike into that track of geometry and arithmetic, in which, from data of experience few, simple, and obvious, an immense field of deductive and verifiable investigation may be travelled over. We must at the same time remark, however, that in his mind this track, which now seems so straightforward and well defined, was clouded by strange fancies which it is not easy to understand, and from which it was but partially cleared by his successors. Of his spiritual training much is said, though not upon very good authority. We hear of his memorial discipline, his monastic self-scrutiny, his employment of music to soothe disorderly passions, his long novitiate of silence, his knowledge of physiognomy, which enabled him to detect even without trial unworthy subjects, his peculiar diet, and his rigid care for sobriety as well as for bodily vigor. lie is also said to have inculcated abstinence from animal food, and this feeling is so naturally connected with the doctrine of the metempsychosis, that we may well believe him to have entertained it, as Empedocles also did after him. It is certain that there were peculiar observances, and probably a certain measure of self-denial embodied in the Pythagorean life; but on the other hand, it seems equally certain that the members of the order cannot have been all subjected to the same diet, or training, or studies. For Milo the Krotoniate was among them, the strongest man and the unparalleled wrestler of his age,—who cannot possibly have dispensed with animal food and ample diet (even setting aside the tales about his voracious appetite), and is not likely to hat e bent his attention on speculative study. Probably Pythagoras did not enforce the same bodily or mental discipline on all, or at least knew when to grant dispensations. The order, as it first stood under him, consisted of men different both in temperament and aptitude, but bound together by common religious observances and hopes, common reverence for the master, and mutual attachment as well as pride in each other’s success; and it must thus be distinguished from the Pythagoreans of the fourth century BC, who had no communion with wrestlers, and comprised only ascetic, studious men, generally recluse, though in some cases rising Io political distinction.

The succession of these Pythagoreans, never very numerous, seems to have continued until about 300 BC, and then nearly died out; being superseded by other schemes of philosophy more suited to cultivated Greeks of the age after Socrates. But during the time of Cicero, two centuries afterwards, the orientalizing tendency—then beginning to spread over the Grecian and Roman world, and becoming gradually stronger and stronger—caused the Pythagorean philosophy to be again revived. It was revived too, with little or none of its scientific tendencies, but with more than its primitive religious and imaginative fanaticism,—Apollonius of Tyana constituting himself a living copy of Pythagoras. And thus, while the scientific elements developed by the disciples of Pythagoras had become disjoined from all peculiarity of sect, and passed into the general studious world,—the original vein of mystic and ascetic fancy belonging to the master, without any of that practical efficiency of body and mind which had marked his first followers, was taken up anew into the pagan world, along with the disfigured doctrines of Plato. Neo-Pythagorism, passing gradually into Neo-Platonism, outlasted the other more positive and masculine systems of pagan philosophy, as the contemporary and rival of Christianity. A large proportion of the false statements concerning Pythagoras come from these Neo-Pythagoreans, who were not deterred by the want of memorials from illustrating, with ample latitude of fancy, the ideal character of the master.

That an inquisitive man like Pythagoras, at a time when there were hardly any books to study, would visit foreign countries, and converse with all the Grecian philosophical inquirers within his reach, is a matter which we should presume, even if no one attested it; and our witnesses carry us very little beyond this general presumption. What doctrines he borrowed, or from whom, we are unable to discover. But, in fact, his whole life and proceedings bear the stamp of an original mind, and not of a borrower,—a mind impressed both with Hellenic and with non-Hellenic habits and religion, yet capable of combining the two in a manner peculiar to himself; and above all endued with those talents for religion and personal ascendency over others, which told for much more than the intrinsic merit of his ideas. We are informed that after extensive travels and inquiries he returned to Samos, at the age of about forty: he then found his native island under the despotism of Polycrates, which rendered it an unsuitable place cither for free sentiments or for marked individuals. Unable to attract hearers, or found any school or brotherhood, in his native island, he determined to expatriate. And we may presume that at this period (about 535-530) the recent subjugation of Ionia by the Persians was not without influence on his determination. The trade between the Asiatic and the Italian Greeks,—and even the intimacy between Miletus and Cnidus on the one side, and Sybaris and Tarentum on the other,—had been great and of long standing, so that there was more than one motive to determine him to the coast of Italy; in which direction also his contemporary Xenophanes, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, emigrated, seemingly, about the same time,—from Kolophon to Zankle, Katana, and Elea.

Kroton and Sybaris were at this time in their fullest prosperity,—among the first and most prosperous cities of the Hellenic name. To the former of the two Pythagoras directed his course. A council of one thousand persons, taken from among the heirs and representatives of the principal proprietors at its first foundation, was here invested with the supreme authority: in what manner the executive offices were filled, we have no information. Besides a great extent of power, and a numerous population, the large mass of whom had no share in the political franchise, Kroton stood at this time distinguished for two things, the general excellence of the bodily habit of the citizens, attested, in part, by the number of conquerors furnished to the Olympic games, —and the superiority of its physicians, or surgeons. These two points were, in fact, greatly connected with each other. For the therapeutics of the day consisted not so much of active remedies as of careful diet and regimen; while the trainer, who dictated the life of an athlete during his long and fatiguing preparation for an Olympic contest, and the professional superintendent of the youths who frequented the public gymnasia, followed out the same general views, and acted upon the same basis of knowledge, as the physician who prescribed for a state of positive bad health. Of medical education properly so called, especially of anatomy, there was then little or nothing. The physician acquired his knowledge from observation of men sick as well as healthy, and from a careful notice of the way in which the human body was acted upon by surrounding agents and circumstances: and this same knowledge was not less necessary for the trainer; so that the same place which contained the best men in the latter class was also likely to be distinguished in the former. It is not improbable that this celebrity of Kroton may have been one of the reasons which determined Pythagoras to go thither; for among the precepts ascribed to him, precise rules as to diet and bodily regulation occupy a prominent place. The medical or surgical celebrity of Demokedes (son-in-law of the Pythagorean Milo), to whom allusion has been made in a former chapter, is contemporaneous with the presence of Pythagoras at Kroton; and the medical men of Magna Graecia maintained themselves in credit, as rivals of the schools of the Asclepiads at Kos and Cnidus, throughout all the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

The biographers of Pythagoras tell us that his arrival there, his preaching, and his conduct, produced an effect almost electric upon the minds of the people, with an extensive reform, public as well as private. Political discontent was repressed, incontinence disappeared, luxury became discredited, and the women, hastened to exchange their golden ornaments for the simplest attire. No less than two thousand persons were converted at his first preaching; and so effective were his discourses to the youth, that the Supreme Council of One Thousand invited him into their assem­bly, solicited his advice, and even offered to constitute him their  prytanis or president, while his wife and daughter were placed at the head of the religious processions of females. Nor was his influence confined to Kroton. Other towns in Italy and Sicily,— Sybaris, Metapontum, Rhegium, Katana, Himera, etc., all felt the benefit of his exhortations, which extricated some of them even from slavery. Such are the tales of which the biographers of Pythagoras are full. And we see that even the disciples of Aristotle, about the year 300 BC,—Aristoxenus, Dikatarchus, Herakleides of Pontus, etc., are hardly less charged with them than the Neo-Pythagoreans of three or four centuries later: they doubtless heard them from their contemporary Pythagoreans, the last members of a declining sect, among whom the attributes of the primitive founder passed for godlike, but who had no memorials, no historical judgment, and no means of forming a true conception of Kroton as it stood in 530 BC.

To trace these tales to a true foundation is impossible: but we may entertain reasonable belief that the success of Pythagoras, as a person favored by the gods and patentee of divine secrets, was very great,—that he procured to himself both the reverence of the multitude and the peculiar attachment and obedience of many devoted adherents, chiefly belonging to the wealthy and powerful classes,—that a select body of these adherents, three hundred in number, bound themselves by a sort of vow both to Pythagoras and to each other, and adopted a peculiar diet, ritual, and observances, as a token of union,—though without anything like community of property, which some have ascribed to them. Such a band of men, standing high in the city for wealth and station, and bound together by this intimate tie, came by almost unconscious tendency to mingle political ambition with religious and scientific pursuits. Political clubs with sworn members, under one form or another, were a constant phenomenon in the Grecian cities, and the Pythagorean order at its first formation was the most efficient of all clubs; since it presented an intimacy of attachment among its members, as well as a feeling of haughty exclusiveness against the public without, such as no other fraternity could parallel. The devoted attachment of Pythagoreans towards each other is not less emphatically set forth than their contempt for every one else. In fact, these two attributes of the order seem the best ascertained, as well as the most permanent of all: moreover, we may be sure that the peculiar observances of the order passed for exemplary virtues in the eyes of its members, and exalted ambition into a duty, by making them sincerely believe that they were the only persons fit to govern. It is no matter of surprise, then, to learn that the Pythagoreans gradually drew to themselves great ascendency in the government of Kroton. And as similar clubs, not less influential, were formed at Metapontum and other places, so the Pythagorean order spread its net and dictated the course of affairs over a large portion of Magna Graecia. Such ascendency of the Pythagoreans must Lave procured for the master himself some real, and still more supposed, influence over the march of government at Kroton and elsewhere, of a nature not then possessed by any of his contemporaries throughout Greece. But his influence was probably exercised in the background, through the medium of the brotherhood who reverenced him: for it is hardly conformable to Greek manners that a stranger of his character should guide personally and avowedly the political affairs of any Grecian city.

Nor are we to believe that Pythagoras came originally to Kroton with the express design of creating for himself an ascendent political position,—still less that, he came for the purpose of realizing a great preconceived political idea, and transforming Kroton into a model-city of pure Dorism, as has been supposed by some eminent modern authors. Such schemes might indeed be ascribed to him by Pythagoreans of the Platonic age, when large ideas of political amelioration were rife in the minds of speculative men,—by men disposed to forego the authorship of their own opinions, and preferring to accredit them as traditions handed down from a founder who had left no memorials; but it requires better evidence than theirs to make us believe that any real Greek born in 580 BC actually conceived such plans. We cannot construe the scheme of Pythagoras as going farther than the formation of a private, select order of brethren, embracing his religious fancies, ethical tone, and germs of scientific idea,—and manifesting adhesion by those observances which Herodotus and Plato call the Pythagorean orgies and mode of life. And his private order became politically powerful, because he was skilful or fortunate enough to enlist a sufficient number of wealthy Krotoniates, possessing individual influence which they strengthened immensely by thus regimenting themselves in intimate union. The Pythagorean orgies or religious ceremonies were not inconsistent with public activity, bodily as well as mental: probably the rich men of the order may have been rendered even more active, by being fortified against the temptations of a life of indulgence. The character of the order as it first stood, different from that to which it was afterwards reduced, was indeed religious and exclusive, but also active and domineering ; not despising any of those bodily accomplishments which increased the efficiency of the Grecian citizen, and which so particularly harmonized with the preexisting tendencies of Kroton. Niebuhr and O. Muller have even supposed that the select Three Hundred Pythagoreans constituted a sort of smaller senate at that city,—an hypothesis no way probable; we may rather conceive them as a powerful private club, exercising ascendency in the interior of the senate, and governing through the medium of the constituted authorities. Nor can we receive without great allow­ance the assertion of Varro, who, assimilating Pythagoras to Plato, tells us that he confined his instructions on matters of government to chosen disciples, who had gone through a complete training, and had reached the perfection of wisdom and virtue. It seems more probable that the political Pythagoreans were those w ho were most qualified for action, and least for speculation. And we may reasonably suppose in the general of the order that skill in turning to account the aptitudes of individuals, which two centuries ago was so conspicuous in the Jesuits; to whom, in various ways, the Pythagoreans bear considerable resemblance. All that we can be said to know about their political principles is, that they were exclusive and aristocratical, adverse to the control and interference of the people; a circumstance no way disadvantageous to them, since they coincided in this respect with the existing government of the city,—had not their own conduct brought additional odium on the old aristocracy, and raised up an aggravated democratical opposition, carried to the most deplorable lengths of violence.

All the information which we possess, apocryphal as it is, respecting this memorable club, is derived from its warm admirers ; yet even their statements are enough to explain how it came to provoke deadly and extensive enmity. A stranger coming to teach new religious dogmas and observances, with a tincture of science and some new ethical ideas and phrases, though he would obtain some zealous votaries, would also bring upon himself a certain measure of antipathy. Extreme strictness of observances, combined with the art of touching skilfully the springs of religious terror in others, would indeed do much both to fortify and to exalt him. But when it was discovered that science, philosophy, and even the mystic revelations of religion, whatever they were, remained confined to the private talk and practice of the disciples, and were thus thrown into the background, while all that was seen and felt without, was the political predominance of an ambitious fraternity,—we need not wonder that Pythagorism in all its parts became odious to a large portion of the community. Moreover, we find the order represented not merely as constituting a devoted and exclusive political party, but also as manifesting an ostentatious self-conceit throughout their personal demeanor,—refusing the hand of fellowship to all except the brethren, and disgusting especially their own familiar friends and kinsmen. So far as we know Grecian philosophy, this is the only instance in which it was distinctly abused for political and party objects: the early days of the Pythagorean order stand distinguished for such perversion, which, fortunately for the progress of philosophy, never presented itself afterwards in Greece. Even at Athens, however, we shall hereafter see that Sokrates, though standing really aloof from all party intrigue, incurred much of his unpopularity from supposed political conjunction with Critias and Alcibiades, to which, indeed, the orator Aeschines distinctly ascribes his condemnation, speaking about sixty years after the event. Had Sokrates been known as the founder of a band holding together intimately for ambitious purposes, the result would have been eminently pernicious to philosophy, and probably much sooner pernicious to himself.

It was this cause which brought about the complete and violent destruction of the Pythagorean order. Their ascendency had provoked such widespread discontent, that their enemies became emboldened to employ extreme force against them. Kylon and Nino—the former of whom is said to have sought admittance into the order, but to have been rejected on account of his bad character—took the lead in pronounced opposition to the Pythagoreans; and the odium which the latter had incurred extended itself farther to the Senate of One Thousand, through the medium of which their ascendency had been exercised. Propositions were made for rendering the government more democratical, and for constituting a new senate, taken by lot from all the people, before which the magistrates should go through their trial of accountability after office; an opportunity being chosen in which the Senate of One Thousand had given signal offence by refusing to divide among the people the recently conquered territory of Sybaris. In spite of the opposition of the Pythagoreans, this change of government was carried through. Ninon and Kylon, their principal enemies, made use of it to exasperate the people still farther against the order, until they provoked actual popular violence against it. The Pythagoreans were attacked when assembled in their meeting-house near the temple of Apollo, or, as some said, in the house of Milo: the building was set on fire, and many of the members perished; none but the younger and more vigorous escaping. Similar disturbances, and the like violent suppression of the order, with destruction of several among the leading citizens, are said to have taken place in other cities of Magna Gracia,—Tarentum, Metapontum, Kaulonia. And we are told that these cities remained for some time in a state of great disquietude and commotion from which they were only rescued by the friendly mediation of the Peloponnesian Achaeans, the original founders of Sybaris and Kroton,—assisted, indeed, by mediators from other parts of Greece The cities were at length pacified, and induced to adopt an amicable congress, with common religious festivals at a temple founded expressly for the purpose, and dedicated to Zeus Homarius.

Thus perished the original Pythagorean order. Respecting Pythagoras himself, there were conflicting accounts; some representing that he was burnt in the temple with his disciples others, that he had died a short time previously; others again affirmed that he was alive at the time, but absent, and that he died not long afterwards in exile, after forty days of voluntary abstinence from food. His tomb was still shown at Metapontum in the days of Cicero. As an active brotherhood, the Pythagoreans never revived; but the dispersed members came together as a sect, for common religious observances and common pursuit of science. They were readmitted, after some interval, into the cities of Magna Graecia, from which they had been originally expelled, but to which the sect is always considered as particularly belonging,—though individual members of it are found besides at Thebes and other cities of Greece. Indeed, some of these later Pythagoreans sometimes even acquired great political influence, as we see in the case of the Tarentine Archytas, the contemporary of Plato.

It has already been stated that the period when Pythagoras arrived at Kroton may be fixed somewhere between bc 540-530; and his arrival is said to have occurred at a time of great depression in the minds of the Krotoniates. They had recently been defeated by the united Lokrians and Rhegians, vastly inferior to themselves in number, at the river Sagra; and the humiliation thus brought upon them is said to have rendered them docile to the training of the Samian missionary. As the birth of the Pythagorean order is thus connected with the defeat of the Krotoniates at the Sagra, so its extinction is also connected with their victory over the Sybarites at the river Traeis, or Trionto, about twenty years afterwards.

Of the history of these two great Achaean cities we unfortunately know very little. Though both were powerful, yet down to the period of 510 BC Sybaris seems to have been decidedly the greatest: of its dominion as well as of its much-denounced luxury I have spoken in a former chapter. It was at that time that the. war broke out between them which ended in the destruction of Sybaris. It is certain that the Sybaritans were aggressors in the war; but by what causes it had been preceded in their own town, or what provocation they had received, we make out very indistinctly. There had been a political revolution at Sybaris, we are told, not long before, in which a popular leader named Telys had headed a rising against the oligarchical gov eminent, and induced the people to banish five hundred of the leading rich men, as well as to confiscate their properties. He had acquired the sovereignty and become despot of Sybaris and it appears that he, er his rule at Sybaris, was much abhorred at Kroton—since the Krotoniate Philippus. a man of splendid muscular form and an Olympic victor, was exiled for having engaged himself to marry the daughter of Telys. According to the narrative given by the later Pythagoreans, those exiles, whom Telys had driven from Sybaris, took refuge at Kroton, and cast themselves as suppliants on the altars for protection. It may well be, indeed, that they were in part Pythagoreans of Sybaris. A body of powerful exiles, harbored in a town so close at hand, naturally inspired alarm, and Telys demanded that they should be delivered up, threatening war in case of refusal. This demand excited consternation at Kroton, since the military strength of Sybaris was decidedly superior. The surrender of the exiles was much debated, and almost decreed, by the Krotoniates, until at length the persuasion of Pythagoras himself is said to have determined them to risk any hazard sooner than incur the dishonor of betraying suppliants.

On the demand of the Sybarites being refused, Telys marched against Kroton, at the head of a force which is reckoned at three hundred thousand men. He marched, too, in defiance of the strongest religious warnings against the enterprise,—for the sacrifices, offered on his behalf by the Jamid prophet Kallias of Elis, were decisively unfavorable, and the prophet himself fled in terror to Kroton. Near the river Traeis, or Trionto, he was met by the forces of Kroton, consisting, we are informed, of one hundred thousand men, and commanded by the great athlete and Pythagorean Milo; who was clothed, we are told, in the costume and armed with the club of Herakles. They were farther reinforced, however, by a valuable ally, the Spartan Dorieus, younger brother of king Kleomenes, then coasting along the gulf of Tarentum with a body of colonists, intending to found a settlement in Sicily. A bloody battle was fought, in which the Sybarites were totally worsted, with prodigious slaughter; while the victors, fiercely provoked and giving no quarter, followed up the pursuit so warmly that they took the city, dispersed its inhabitants, and crushed its whole power in the short space of seventy days. The Sybarites fled in great part to Laus and Skidrus, their settlements planted on the Mediterranean coast, across the Calabrian peninsula. And so eager were the Krotoniates to render the site of Sybaris untenable, that they turned the course of the river Krathis so as to overwhelm and destroy it: the dry bed in which the river had originally flowed was still visible in the time of Herodotus, who was among the settlers in the town of Thurii, afterwards founded, nearly

It appears, however, that the Krotoniates for a long time kept the site of Sybaris deserted, refusing even to allot the territory among the body of their own citizens: from which circumstances, as has been before noticed, the commotion against, the Pythago­rean order is said to have arisen. They may perhaps have been afraid of the name and recollections of the city; wherein no large or permanent establishment was ever formed, until Thurii was established by Athens about sixty-five years afterwards. Nevertheless, the name of the Sybarites did not perish. Having maintained themselves at Laos, Skidros, and elsewhere, they afterwards formed the privileged old-citizens among the colonists of Thurii; but misbehaved themselves in that capacity, and were mostly either slain or expelled. Even after that, however, the name of Sybaris still remained on a reduced scale in some portion of the territory. Herodotus recounts what he was told by the Sybarites, and we find subsequent indications of them even as late as Theokritus.

The conquest and destruction of the original Sybaris—perhaps in 510 BC, the greatest of all Grecian cities—appears to have excited a strong sympathy in the Hellenic world. In Miletus, especially, with which it had maintained intimate union, the grief was so vehement, that all the Milesians shaved their heads in token of mourning. The event happened just at the time of the expulsion of Hippias from Athens, and must have made a sensible revolution in the relations of the Greek cities on the Italian coast with the rustic population of the interior. The Krotoniates might destroy Sybaris, and disperse its inhabitants, but they could not succeed to its wide dominion over dependent territory; and the extinction of this great aggregate power, stretching across the peninsula from sea to sea, lessened the means of resistance against the Oscan movements from the inland. From this time forward, the cities of Magna Gracia, as well as those of Ionia, tend to decline in consequence, while Athens, on the other hand, becomes both more conspicuous and more powerful. At the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, thirty years after this conquest of Sybaris, Sparta and Athens send to ask for aid both from Sicily and Corcyra,—but not from Magna Gracia.

It is much to be regretted that we do not possess fuller information respecting these important changes among the Greco-Italian cities, but we may remark that even Herodotus,—himself a citizen of Thurii, and dwelling on the spot not more than eighty years after the capture of Sybaris,—evidently found no written memorials to consult; and could obtain from verbal conversation nothing better than statements both meagre and contradictory. The material circumstance, for example, of the aid rendered by the Spartan Dorieus and his colonists, though positively asserted by the Sybarites, was as positively denied by the Krotoniates, who alleged that they had accomplished the conquest by themselves, and with their own unaided forces. There can be little hesitation in crediting the affirmative assertion of the Sybarites, who showed to Herodotus a temple and precinct erected by the Spartan prince in testimony of his share in the victory, on the banks of the dry, deserted channel, out of which the Krathis had been turned, and in honor of the Krathian Athene. This of itself forms a proof, coupled with the positive assertion of the Sybarites, sufficient for the case. But they pro­duced another indirect argument to confirm it, which deserves notice. Dorieus had attacked Sybaris while he was passing along the coast of Italy to go and found a colony in Sicily, under the express mandate and encouragement of the oracle ; and after tarrying awhile at Sybaris, he pursued his journey to the southwestern portion of Sicily, where he and nearly all his companions perished in a battle with the Carthaginians and Egestaeans,—though the oracle had promised him that he should acquire and occupy permanently the neighboring territory near Mount Eryx. Now the Sybarites deduced from this fatal disaster of Dorieus and his expedition, combined with the favorable promise of the oracle beforehand, u confident proof of the correctness of their own statement that he had fought at Sybaris. For if he had gone straight to the territory marked out by the oracle, they argued, without turning aside for any other object, the prophecy on which his hopes were founded would have been unquestionably realized, and he would have succeeded; but the ruinous disappointment which actually overtook him was at once explained, and the truth of prophecy vindicated, when it was recollected that he had turned aside to help the Krotoniates against Sybaris, and thus set at nought the conditions prescribed to him. Upon this argument, Herodotus tells us, the Sybarites of his day especially insisted. And while we note their pious and literal faith in the communications of an inspired prophet, we must at the same time observe how perfectly that faith supplied the place of historical premises,—how scanty their stock was of such legitimate evidence,—and how little they had yet learned to appreciate its value.

It is to be remarked, that Herodotus, in his brief mention of the fatal war between Sybaris and Kroton, does not make the least allusion to Pythagoras or his brotherhood. The least which we can infer from such silence is, that the part which they played in reference to the war, and their general ascendency in Magna Graecia, was in reality less conspicuous and overruling than the Pythagorean historians set forth. Even making such allowance, however, the absence of all allusion in Herodotus, to the commotions which accompanied the subversion of the Pythagoreans, is a surprising circumstance. Nor can I pass over a perplexing statement in Polybius, which seems to show that he too must have conceived the history of Sybaris io a way different from that in which it is commonly represented. He tells us that after much suffering in Magna Graecia, from the troubles which followed the expulsion of the Pythagoreans, the cities were induced by Achman mediation to come to an accommodation, and even to establish something like a permanent league, with a common temple and sacrifices. Now the three cities which he specifies as having been the first to do this, are Kroton, Sybaris, and Kaulonia. But according to the sequence of events and the fatal war, just described, between Kroton and Sybaris, the latter city must have been at that time in ruins; little, if at all, inhabited. I cannot but infer from this statement of Polybius, that he followed different authorities respecting the early history of Magna Graecia in the beginning of the fifth century BC.

Indeed, the early history of these cities gives us little more than a few isolated facts and names. With regard to their legislators, Zaleukus and Charondas, nothing is made out except their existence,—and even that fact some ancient critics contested. Of Zaleukus, whom chronologists place in 664 bc, I have already spoken; the date of Charondas cannot be assigned, but we may perhaps presume that it was at some time between 600-500 bc. He was a citizen of middling station, born in the Chalcidic colony of Katana in Sicily, and he framed laws not only for his own city, but for the other Chalcidic cities in Sicily and Italy,—Leontini, Naxos, Zankle, and Rhegium. The laws and the solemn preamble ascribed to him by Diodorus and Stobaeus, belong to a later day, and we are obliged to content ourselves with collecting the brief hints of Aristotle, who tells us that the laws of Charondas descended to great minuteness of distinction and specification, especially in graduating the fine for offences according to the property of the guilty person fined,—but that there was nothing in his laws strictly original and peculiar, except that, he was the first to introduce the solemn indictment against perjured witnesses before justice. The perjured witness, in Grecian ideas, was looked upon as having committed a crime half religious, half civil; and the indictment raised against him, known by a peculiar name, partook of both characters, approach­ing in some respects to the procedure against a murderer. Such distinct form of indictment against perjured testimony—with its appropriate name, which we shall find maintained at Athens throughout the best-known days of Attic law—was first enacted by Charondas.