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 B. C.), and the few
and vague statements which we find respecting it,[688] merely show
us that it was a period of extortion and cruelty, even beyond the
ordinary licence 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,[689]—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[690] 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
he 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 Têlemachus (ancestor of the
subsequent despot, Thêro), overthrew and slew him. A severe revenge
was taken on his partisans after his fall.[691]
[688] The letters of Bentley against Boyle, discussing the
pretended Epistles of Phalaris,—full of acuteness and learning,
though beyond measure excursive,—are quite sufficient to teach us
that little can be safely asserted about Phalaris. His date is
very imperfectly ascertained. Compare Bentley, pp. 82, 83, and
Seyfert, Akragas und sein Gebiet, p. 60: the latter assigns the
reign of Phalaris to the years 570-554 B. C. It is surprising
to see Seyfert citing the letters of the pseudo-Phalaris as an
authority, after the exposure of Bentley.
[689] Pindar. Pyth. 1 _ad fin_, with the Scholia, p. 310, ed.
Boeckh; Polyb. xii, 25; Diodor. xiii, 99; Cicero cont. Verr.
iv, 33. The contradiction of Timæus is noway sufficient to make
us doubt the authenticity of the story. Ebert (Σικελίων, part
ii, pp. 41-84, Königsberg, 1829) collects all the authorities
about the bull of Phalaris. He believes the matter of fact
substantially. Aristotle (Rhetoric, ii, 20) tells a story of the
fable, whereby Stêsichorus the poet dissuaded the inhabitants
of Himera from granting a guard to Phalaris: Conon (Narrat.
42 ap. Photium) recounts the same story with the name of
Hiero substituted for that of Phalaris. But it is not likely
that either the one or the other could ever have been in such
relations with the citizens of _Himera_. Compare Polybius, vii,
7, 2.
[690] Polyæn. v, 1, 1; Cicero de Officiis, ii, 7.
[691] Plutarch, Philosophand. cum Principibus, c. 3, p. 778.
During the interval between 540-500 B. C., 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 B. C.
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. One of them, however,
the Milesian Thalês, 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 640-550 B. C.: the stories
mentioned in Herodotus—perhaps borrowed in part from the Milesian
Hekatæus—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 Sokratês; 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. But 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 Thalês, Hippo, Anaximenês, and
Diogenês of Apollonia, whereby they all stand distinguished from
Xenophanês of Elea, and his successors, the Eleatic dialecticians,
Parmenidês and Zeno; but there are also material differences between
their respective doctrines,—no two of them holding the same. And if
we look to Anaximander, the person next in order of time to Thalês,
as well as to Herakleitus, 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
Thalês 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 Thalês 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 Thalês 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.[692]
[692] The less these problems are adapted for rational solution,
the more nobly do they present themselves in the language of a
great poem; see as a specimen, Euripidês, Fragment. 101, ed.
Dindorf.
Ὄλβιος ὅστις τῆς ἱστορίας
Ἔσχε μάθησιν, μήτε πολιτῶν
Ἐπὶ πημοσύνῃ, μήτ᾽ εἰς ἀδίκους
Πράξεις ὁρμῶν·
Ἀλλ᾽ ἀθανάτου καθορῶν φύσεως
Κόσμον ἀγήρω, πῆ τε συνέστη
Καὶ ὅπη καὶ ὅπως.
Τοῖς δὲ τοιούτοις οὐδέποτ᾽ αἰσχρῶν
Ἔργων μελέτημα προσίζει.
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 _quæsita_, 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 to be solved and means of solution, which gave rise
to that conspicuous characteristic of Grecian 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 Xenophanês, continuing to manifest itself seven centuries
afterwards in Ænesidêmus 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 Sokratês and Plato, to
denounce professed skepticism with indignation. But it is essential
to bring them into notice at the first spring of Grecian philosophy
under Thalês, because the circumstances were then laid which so soon
afterwards developed them.
Though the celebrity of Thalês 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 are 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 Alkæus 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 temple-observatory of the Chaldæan 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, Xenophanês, 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 B. C., 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),[693]
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 Thalês,—still less upon the
solar eclipse respecting which, according to Herodotus, he determined
beforehand the year of occurrence.[694] 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.[695] 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 Grecian public.
We have no means of knowing the reasons by which Thalês 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,[696]—we may
safely refer to the Milesian himself, for it would hardly have been
advanced at a later age. Moreover, Thalês 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:[697] the universe being assimilated to an
organized body or system.
[693] Vol. i, ch. xvi.
[694] Diogen. Laërt. i, 23; Herodot. i, 75; Apuleius, Florid. iv,
p. 144, Bip.
Proclus, in his Commentary on Euclid, specifies several
propositions said to have been discovered by Thalês (Brandis,
Handbuch der Gr. Philos. ch. xxviii, p. 110).
[695] Aristotel. Metaphys. i, 3; Plutarch, Placit. Philos. i,
3, p. 875. ὃς ἐξ ὔδατος φησὶ πάντα εἶναι, καὶ εἰς ὕδωρ πάντα
ἀναλύεσθαι.
[696] Aristotel. _ut supra_, and De Cœlo, ii, 13.
[697] Aristotel. De Animâ, i, 2-5; Cicero, De Legg. ii, 11;
Diogen. Laërt. i, 24.
Respecting Hippo,—who reproduced the theory of Thalês under a more
generalized form of expression, substituting, in place of water,
moisture, or something common to air and water,[698]—we do not know
whether he belonged to the sixth or the fifth century B. C. But
Anaximander, Xenophanês, and Pherekydês belong to the latter half of
the sixth century. Anaximander, the son of Praxiadês, was a native
of Milêtus,—Xenophanês, a native of Kolophon; the former, among the
earliest expositors of doctrine in prose,[699] 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 Thalês. 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,[700]—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.[701] 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
nothing by possessing this very power of generation.
[698] Aristotel. De Animâ, i, 2; Alexander Aphrodis. in
Aristotel. Metaphys. 1, 3.
[699] Apollodorus, in the second century B. C., had before him
some brief expository treatises of Anaximander (Diogen. Laërt.
ii, 2): Περὶ Φύσεως, Γῆς Περίοδον, Περὶ τῶν Ἀπλανῶν καὶ Σφαῖραν
καὶ ἄλλα τινά. Suidas, v. Ἀναξίμανδρος. Themistius. Orat. xxv,
p. 317: ἐθάῤῥησε πρῶτος ὦν ἴσμεν Ἐλλήνων λόγον ἐξενεγκεῖν περὶ
Φύσεως συγγεγραμμένον.
[700] Irenæus, ii, 19, (14) ap. Brandis, Handbuch der Geschichte
der Griech. Röm. Philos. ch. xxxv, p. 133: “Anaximander hoc
quod immensum est, omnium initium subjecit, seminaliter habens
in semetipso omnium genesin, ex quo immensos mundos constare
ait.” Aristotel. Physic. Auscult. iii, 4, p. 203, Bek. οὔτε γὰρ
μάτην αὐτὸ οἶόν τε εἶναι (τὸ ἄπειρον), οὔτε ἄλλην ὑπάρχειν αὐτῷ
δύναμιν, πλὴν ὡς ἀρχήν. Aristotle subjects this ἄπειρον to an
elaborate discussion, in which he says very little more about
Anaximander, who appears to have assumed it without anticipating
discussion or objections. Whether Anaximander called his
ἄπειρον divine, or god, as Tennemann (Gesch. Philos. i, 2, p.
67) and Panzerbieter affirm (ad Diogenis Apolloniat. Fragment.
c. 13, p. 16,) I think doubtful: this is rather an inference
which Aristotle elicits from his language. Yet in another
passage, which is difficult to reconcile, Aristotle ascribes
to Anaximander the water-doctrine of Thalês, (Aristotel. de
Xenophane, p. 975. Bek.)
Anaximander seems to have followed speculations analogous to
those of Thalês, in explaining the first production of the human
race (Plutarch Placit. Philos. v, 19, p. 908), and in other
matters (ibid. iii, 16, p. 896).
[701] Aristotel. De Generat. et Destruct. c. 3, p. 317, Bek. ὃ
μάλιστα φοβούμενοι διετέλεσαν οἱ πρῶτοι φιλοσοφήσαντες, τὸ ἐκ
μηδενὸς γίνεσθαι προϋπάρχοντος· compare Physic. Auscultat. i, 4,
p. 187, Bek.
In his theory, he passed from the province of physics into that
of metaphysics. He first introduced into Grecian philosophy that
important word which signifies a beginning or a principle,[702] and
first opened that metaphysical discussion, which was carried on in
various ways throughout the whole period of Grecian philosophy, as
to the one and the many—the continuous and the variable—that which
exists eternally, as 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 Thalês, 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 Thalês, although deserted by
Anaximander, was taken up by Anaximenês 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 B. C., among whom Anaximander stands prominent, not as the
follower of Thalês, but as the author of an hypothesis both new and
tending in a different direction.
[702] Simplicius in Aristotel. Physic. fol. 6, 32. πρῶτος αὐτὸς
Ἀρχὴν ὀνομάσας τὸ ὑποκείμενον.
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;[703] 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 to the stock of human knowledge.
[703] Diogen. Laërt. ii, 81, 2. He agreed with Thalês in
maintaining that the earth was stationary, (Aristotel. de Cœlo,
ii, 13, p. 295, ed. Bekk.)
Xenophanês of Kolophon, somewhat younger than Anaximander, and
nearly contemporary with Pythagoras (seemingly from about 570-480
B. C.), migrated from Kolophon[704] to Zanklê and Katana in Sicily
and Elea in Italy, soon after the time when Ionia became subject
to the Persians, (540-530 B. C.) He was the founder of what is
called the Eleatic school of philosophers,—a real school, since it
appears that Parmenidês, Zeno, and Melissus, pursued and developed,
in a great degree, the train of speculation which had been begun by
Xenophanês,—doubtless with additions and variations of their own,
but especially with a dialectic power which belongs to the age of
Periklês, and is unknown in the sixth century B. C. 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.[705] 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.[706]
[704] Diogen. Laërt. ix, 18.
[705] Diogen. Laërt. ix, 22; Stobæus, Eclog. Phys. i, p. 294.
[706] Sextus Empiricus, adv. Mathem. ix, 193.
He is said to have controverted the doctrines both of Thalês 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 this 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.
Xenophanês 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,[707]—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.[708]
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 Xenophanês; at
least we may infer thus much from the slighting epithet applied to
him by Aristotle.[709] But his successors, Parmenidês 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 Xenophanês, moreover, a vein
of skepticism, and a mournful despair as to the attainability of
certain knowledge,[710] which the nature of his philosophy was well
calculated to suggest, and in which the sillograph Timon of the third
century B. C., who seems to have spoken of Xenophanês better than of
most of the other philosophers, powerfully sympathized.
[707] Aristot. Metaphys. i, 5, p. 986, Bek. Ξενοφάνης δὲ πρῶτος
τούτων ~ἑνίσας~, οὐθὲν διεσαφήνισεν, οὐδὲ τῆς φύσεως τούτων
(τοῦ κατὰ τὸν λόγον ἑνὸς καὶ τοῦ κατὰ τὴν ὕλην) οὐδετέρας ἔοικε
θιγεῖν, ἀλλ᾽ εἰς τὸν ὅλον οὐρανὸν ἀποβλέψας τὸ ἓν εἶναί φησι τὸν
θεόν.
Plutarch. ap. Eusebium Præparat. Evangel. i, 8. Ξενοφάνης δὲ ὁ
Κολοφώνιος ἰδίαν μέν τινα ὁδὸν πεπορευμένος καὶ παρηλλαχυῖαν
πάντας τοὺς προειρημένους, οὔτε γένεσιν οὔτε φθορὰν ἀπολείπει,
ἀλλ᾽ εἶναι λέγει τὸ πᾶν ἀεὶ ὅμοιον. Compare Timon ap. Sext.
Empiric. Pyrrh. Hypotyp. i, 224, 225. ἐδογμάτιζε δὲ ὁ Ξενοφάνης
παρὰ τὰς τῶν ἄλλων ἀνθρώπων προλήψεις, ἓν εἶναι τὸ πᾶν, καὶ
τὸν θεὸν συμφυῆ τοῖς πᾶσιν· εἶναι δὲ σφαιροειδὴ καὶ ἀπαθῆ καὶ
ἀμετάβλητον καὶ λογικόν, (Airstot. de Xenoph. c. 3, p. 977,
Bek.). Ἀδύνατόν φησιν (ὁ Ξενοφάνης) εἶναι, εἴ τι ἐστὶν, γενέσθαι,
etc.
One may reasonably doubt whether all the arguments ascribed to
Xenophanês, in the short but obscure treatise last quoted, really
belong to him.
[708] Clemens Alexand. Stromat. v, p. 601, vii, p. 711.
[709] Aristot. Metaphysic. i, 5, p. 986, Bek. μικρὸν ἀγροικότερος.
[710] Xenophanês, Fr. xiv, ed. Mullach; Sextus Empiric. adv.
Mathematicos, vii, 49-110; and Pyrrhon. Hypotyp. i, 224; Plutarch
adv. Colôtên, p. 1114; compare Karsten ad Parmenidis Fragmenta,
p. 146.
The cosmogony of Pherekydês 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,[711] and probably exercised little influence
over the subsequent course of Grecian philosophy. By what has been
said of Thalês, Anaximander, and Xenophanês, it will be seen that
the sixth century B. C. 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 B. C. many interesting questions were thus brought
into discussion, which Solon, who died about 558 B. C., 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 Xenophanês—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.
[711] See Brandis, Handbuch der Griech. Röm. Philosophie, ch.
xxii.
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,[712] son of an opulent merchant
named Mnêsarchus,—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 B. C. 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 Chaldæans, the Indians, and the Gallic Druids. But there is
reason to believe that he really visited Egypt[713]—perhaps also
Phenicia—and Babylon, then Chaldæan and independent. At the time
when he saw Egypt, between 560-540 B. C., 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 Thalês, of Anaximander, and of Pherekydês of
Syros.[714] 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.
[712] Herodot. iv, 95. The place of his nativity is certain
from Herodotus, but even this fact was differently stated by
other authors, who called him a Tyrrhenian of Lemnos or Imbros
(Porphyry, Vit. Pythag. c. 1-10), a Syrian, a Phliasian, etc.
Cicero (De Repub. ii, 15: compare Livy, i, 18) censures the
chronological blunder of those who made Pythagoras the preceptor
of Numa; which certainly is a remarkable illustration how much
confusion prevailed among literary men of antiquity about the
dates of events even of the sixth century B. C. Ovid follows this
story without hesitation: see Metamorph. xv, 60, with Burmann’s
note.
[713] Cicero de Fin. v, 29; Diogen. Laërt. viii, 3; Strabo, xiv,
p. 638; Alexander Polyhistor ap. Cyrill. cont. Julian. iv, p.
128, ed. Spanh. For the vast reach of his supposed travels, see
Porphyry, Vit. Pythag. 11; Jamblic 14, _seqq._
The same extensive journeys are ascribed to Demokritus, Diogen.
Laërt. ix, 35.
[714] The connection of Pythagoras with Pherekydês is noticed
by Aristoxenus ap. Diogen. Laërt. i, 118, viii, 2; Cicero de
Divinat. i, 13.
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 Xenophanês 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 Hêrakleitus, 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.[715]
[715] Xenophanês, Fragm. 7, ed. Schneidewin; Diogen. Laërt. viii,
36: compare Aulus Gellius, iv, 11 (we must remark that this or a
like doctrine is not peculiar to Pythagoreans, but believed by
the poet Pindar, Olymp. ii, 68, and Fragment, Thren. x, as well
as by the philosopher Pherekydês, Porphyrius de Antro Nympharum,
c. 31).
Καί ποτέ μιν στυφελιζομένου σκύλακος παριόντα
Φασὶν ἐποικτεῖραι, καὶ τόδε φάσθαι ἔπος—
Παῦσαι, μηδὲ ῥάπιζ᾽· ἐπείη φίλου ἄνερός ἐστι
Ψυχὴ, τὴν ἔγνων φθεγξαμένης ἀΐων.
Consult also Sextus Empiricus, viii, 286, as to the κοινωνία
between gods, men and animals, believed both by Pythagoras and
Empedoklês. That Herodotus (ii, 123) alludes to Orpheus and
Pythagoras, though refraining designedly from mentioning names,
there can hardly be any doubt: compare ii, 81; also Aristotle, De
Animâ, i, 3, 23.
The testimony of Hêrakleitus is contained in Diogenes Laërtius,
viii, 6; ix, 1. Ἡρακλεῖτος γοῦν ὁ φυσικὸς μονονουχὶ κέκραγε καί
φησι· Πυθαγόρης Μνησάρχου ἱστορίην ἤσκησεν ἀνθρώπων μάλιστα
πάντων, καὶ ἐκλεξάμενος ταύτας τὰς συγγραφὰς, ἐποιήσατο ἑαυτοῦ
~σοφίην, πολυμαθείην, κακοτεχνίην~. Again, Πολυμαθίη νόον
οὐ διδάσκει· Ἡσίοδον γὰρ ἂν ἐδίδαξε καὶ Πυθαγόρην, αὖθις δὲ
Ξενοφάνεά τε καὶ Ἑκαταῖον.
Dr. Thirlwall conceives Xenophanês as having intended in the
passage above cited to treat the doctrine of the metempsychosis
“with deserved ridicule.” (Hist. of Greece, ch. xii, vol. ii, p.
162.) Religious opinions are so apt to appear ridiculous to those
who do not believe them, that such a suspicion is not unnatural;
yet I think, if Xenophanês had been so disposed, he would have
found more ridiculous examples among the many which this doctrine
might suggest. Indeed, it seems hardly possible to present the
metempsychosis in a more touching or respectable point of view
than that which the lines of his poem set forth. The particular
animal selected is that one between whom and man the sympathy is
most marked and reciprocal, while the doctrine is made to enforce
a practical lesson against cruelty.
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[716]) 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 Epimenidês, 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,[717] 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.[718] In these lofty pretensions the Agrigentine Empedoklês
seems to have greatly copied him, though with some varieties, about
half a century afterwards.[719] 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.”[720] 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.
[716] Herodot. i, 29; ii, 49; iv, 95. Ἑλλήνων οὐ τῷ ἀσθενεστάτῳ
σοφιστῇ Πυθαγόρῃ. Hippokratês distinguishes the σοφιστὴς from
the ἰητρὸς, though both of them had handled the subject of
medicine,—the general from the special habits of investigation.
(Hippokratês, Περὶ ἀρχαίης ἰητρικῆς, c. 20, vol. i, p. 620,
Littré.)
[717] See Lobeck’s learned and valuable treatise, Aglaophamus,
Orphica, lib. ii, pp. 247, 698, 900; also Plato, Legg. vi, 782,
and Euripid. Hippol. 946.
[718] Plato’s conception of Pythagoras (Republ. x, p. 600)
depicts him as something not unlike St. Benedict, or St. Francis,
(or St. Elias, as some Carmelites have tried to make out: see
Kuster ad Jamblich. c. 3)—Ἀλλὰ δὴ, εἰ μὴ δημοσίᾳ, ἰδίᾳ τισὶν
ἡγεμὼν παιδείας αὐτὸς ζῶν λέγεται Ὅμηρος γενέσθαι, οἱ ἐκεῖνον
ἠγάπων ἐπὶ συνουσίᾳ καὶ τοῖς ὑστέροις ὁδόν τινα βίου παρέδοσαν
Ὁμηρικήν· ὥσπερ Πυθαγόρας αὐτός τε διαφερόντως ἐπὶ τούτῳ ἠγαπήθη,
καὶ οἱ ὕστερον ἔτι καὶ νῦν Πυθαγορεῖον τροπὸν ἐπονομάζοντες τοῦ
βίου διαφανεῖς πῃ δοκοῦσιν εἶναι ἐν τοῖς ἄλλοις.
The description of Melampus, given in Herodot. ii, 49, very much
fills up the idea of Pythagoras, as derived from ii, 81-123,
and iv, 95. Pythagoras, as well as Melampus, was said to have
pretended to divination and prophecy (Cicero, Divinat. i, 3,
46; Porphyr. Vit. Pyth. c. 29: compare Krische, De Societate a
Pythagorâ in urbe Crotoniatarum conditâ Commentatio, ch. v, p.
72, Göttingen, 1831).
[719] Brandis, Handbuch der Geschichte der Griechisch. Rom.
Philosophie, part i, sect. xlvii, p. 191.
[720] Ælian. V. H. ii, 26; Jamblichus, Vit. Pyth. c. 31, 140;
Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. c. 20; Diodorus, Fragm. lib. x, vol. iv, p.
56, Wess.: Timon ap. Diogen. Laërt. viii, 36; and Plutarch, Numa,
c. 8.
Πυθαγόρην τε γόητος ἀποκλίναντ᾽ ἐπὶ δόξαν
Θήρῃ ἐπ᾽ ἀνθρώπων, σεμνηγορίης ὀαριστὴν.
Looking at the general type of Pythagoras, as conceived by witnesses
in and nearest to his own age,—Xenophanês, Hêrakleitus, Herodotus,
Plato, Aristotle, Isokratês,[721]—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 Dikæarchus. The
primitive Pythagoras inspired by the gods to reveal a new mode of
life,[722]—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.[723] 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 Thalês, 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,[724] 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. He 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 Empedoklês also did
after him.[725] 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,[726] 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 have 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 B.
C., who had no communion with wrestlers, and comprised only ascetic,
studious men, generally recluse, though in some cases rising to
political distinction.
[721] Isokratês, Busiris, p. 402, ed. Auger. Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος,
ἀφικόμενος εἰς Αἴγυπτον, καὶ μαθητὴς τῶν ἱερέων γενόμενος, τήν τε
ἄλλην φιλοσοφίαν πρῶτος εἰς τοὺς Ἕλληνας ἐκόμισε, καὶ τὰ περὶ τὰς
θυσίας καὶ τὰς ἁγιστείας ἐν τοῖς ἱεροῖς ἐπιφανέστερον τῶν ἄλλων
ἐσπούδασε.
Compare Aristotel. Magn. Moralia, i, 1, about Pythagoras as
an ethical teacher. Dêmokritus, born about 460 B. C., wrote
a treatise (now lost) respecting Pythagoras, whom he greatly
admired: as far as we can judge, it would seem that he too must
have considered Pythagoras as an ethical teacher (Diogen. Laërt.
xi, 38; Mullach, Democriti Fragmenta, lib. ii, p. 113; Cicero de
Orator. iii, 15).
[722] Jamblichus, Vit. Pyth. c. 64, 115, 151, 199: see also the
idea ascribed to Pythagoras, of divine inspirations coming on men
(ἐπίπνοια παρὰ τοῦ δαιμονίου). Aristoxenus apud Stobæum, Eclog.
Physic. p. 206; Diogen. Laërt. viii, 32.
Meiners establishes it as probable that the stories respecting
the miraculous powers and properties of Pythagoras got into
circulation either during his lifetime, or at least not long
after his death (Geschichte der Wissenschaften, b. iii, vol. i,
pp. 504, 505).
[723] Respecting Philolaus, see the valuable collection of
his fragments, and commentary on them, by Boeckh (Philolaus
des Pythagoreers Leben, Berlin, 1819). That Philolaus was the
first who composed a work on Pythagorean science, and thus made
it known beyond the limits of the brotherhood—among others to
Plato—appears well established (Boeckh, Philolaus, p. 22; Diogen.
Laërt. viii, 15-55; Jamblichus, c. 119). Simmias and Kebês,
fellow-disciples of Plato under Sokratês, had held intercourse
with Philolaus at Thebes (Plato, Phædon, p. 61), perhaps about
420 B. C. The Pythagorean brotherhood had then been dispersed in
various parts of Greece, though the attachment of its members to
each other seems to have continued long afterwards.
[724] Plutarch, De Isid. et Osirid. p. 384, ad fin. Quintilian,
Instit. Oratt. ix, 4.
[725] Empedoklês, ap. Aristot. Rhetoric. i, 14, 2; Sextus
Empiric. ix, 127; Plutarch, De Esu Carnium, pp. 993, 996, 997;
where he puts Pythagoras and Empedoklês together, as having both
held the doctrine of the metempsychosis, and both prohibited the
eating of animal food. Empedoklês supposed that plants had souls,
and that the souls of human beings passed after death into plants
as well as into animals. “I have been myself heretofore (said he)
a boy, a girl, a shrub, a bird, and a fish of the sea.”
ἤδη γάρ ποτ᾽ ἐγὼ γενόμην κοῦρός τε κόρη τε,
θάμνος τ᾽, οἴωνός τε καὶ ἐξ ἁλὸς ἔμπυρος ἰχθύς.
(Diogen. L. viii, 77; Sturz. ad Empedokl. Frag. p. 466.)
Pythagoras is said to have affirmed that he had been not only
Euphorbus in the Grecian army before Troy, but also a tradesman,
a courtezan, etc., and various other human characters, before
his actual existence; he did not, however, extend the same
intercommunion to plants, in any case.
The abstinence from animal food was an Orphic precept as well as
a Pythagorean (Aristophan. Ran. 1032).
[726] Strabo, vi, p. 263; Diogen. L. viii, 40.
The succession of these Pythagoreans, never very numerous, seems
to have continued until about 300 B. C., and then nearly died out;
being superseded by other schemes of philosophy more suited to
cultivated Greeks of the age after Sokratês. 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 Polykratês, which
rendered it an unsuitable place either 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 B. C.) 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 Milêtus and Knidus 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
Xenophanês, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy,
emigrated, seemingly, about the same time,—from Kolophon to Zanklê,
Katana, and Elea.[727]
[727] Diogen. Laërt. ix, 18.
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.[728] 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.[729] 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 Dêmokêdês (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 Græcia maintained themselves in
credit, as rivals of the schools of the Asklepiads at Kôs and Knidus,
throughout all the fifth and fourth centuries B. C.
[728] Herodot. iii, 131; Strabo, vi, p. 261: Menander de
Encomiis, p. 96, ed. Heeren. Ἀθηναίους ἐπὶ ἀγαλματοποιΐα τε καὶ
ζωγραφικῇ, καὶ Κροτωνιάτας ἐπὶ ἰατρικῇ, μέγα φρονῆσαι, etc.
The Krotoniate Alkmæon, a younger contemporary of Pythagoras
(Aristotel. Metaph. i, 5), is among the earliest names mentioned
as philosophizing upon physical and medical subjects. See
Brandis, Handbuch der Geschicht. der Philos. sect. lxxxiii, p.
508, and Aristotel. De Generat. Animal. iii, 2, p. 752, Bekker.
The medical art in Egypt, at the time when Pythagoras visited
that country, was sufficiently far advanced to excite the
attention of an inquisitive traveller,—the branches of it
minutely subdivided and strict rules laid down for practice
(Herodot. ii, 84; Aristotel. Politic, iii, 10, 4).
[729] See the analogy of the two strikingly brought out in the
treatise of Hippokratês Περὶ ἀρχαίης ἰητρικῆς, c. 3, 4, 7, vol.
i, p. 580-584, ed. Littré.
Ἔτι γοῦν καὶ νῦν οἱ τῶν γυμνασίων τε καὶ ἀσκησίων ἐπιμελόμενοι
αἰεί τι προσεξευρίσκουσι, καὶ τὴν αὐτέην ὁδὸν ζητέοντες ὅ,τι ἔδων
καὶ πίνων ἐπικρατήσει τε αὐτέων μάλιστα, καὶ ἰσχυρότερος αὐτὸς
ἑωϋτοῦ ἔσται (p. 580); again, p. 584: Τί οὖν φαίνεται ἑτεροῖον
διανοηθεὶς ὁ καλεύμενος ἰητρὸς καὶ ὁμολογεομένως χειροτέχνης, ὃς
ἐξεῦρε τὴν ἀμφὶ τοὺς κάμνοντας δίαιτάν καὶ τροφὴν, ἢ κεῖνος ὁ ἀπ᾽
ἀρχῆς τοῖσι πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποισι τροφὴν, ᾗ νῦν χρεόμεθα, ἐξ ἐκείνης
τῆς ἀγρίης τε καὶ θηριώδεος εὑρών τε καὶ παρασκευάσας διαίτης:
compare another passage, not less illustrative, in the treatise
of Hippokratês Περὶ διαίτης ὀξέων, c. 3, vol. ii, p. 245, ed.
Littré.
Following the same general idea, that the theory and practice of
the physician is a farther development and variety of that of
the gymnastic trainer, I transcribe some observations from the
excellent Remarques Rétrospectives of M. Littré, at the end of
the fourth volume of his edition of Hippokratês (p. 662).
After having observed (p. 659) that physiology may be considered
as divided into two parts,—one relating to the mechanism of the
functions; the other, to the effects produced upon the human
body by the different influences which act upon it and the media
by which it is surrounded; and after having observed that on
the first of these two branches the ancients could never make
progress from their ignorance of anatomy,—he goes on to state,
that respecting the second branch they acquired a large amount of
knowledge:—
“Sur la physiologie des influences extérieures, la Grèce du
temps d’Hippocrate et après lui fut le théâtre d’expériences en
grand, les plus importantes et les plus instructives. Toute la
population (la population libre, s’entend) étoit soumise à un
système régulier d’éducation physique (N. B. this is a little too
strongly stated): dans quelques cités, à Lacédémone par exemple,
les femmes n’en étoient pas exemptées. Ce système se composoit
d’exercices et d’une alimentation, que combinèrent l’empirisme
d’abord, puis une théorie plus savante: il concernoit (comme
dit Hippocrate lui-même, en ne parlant, il est vrai, que de la
partie alimentaire), il concernoit et les malades pour leur
rétablissement, et les gens bien portans pour la conservation de
leur santé, et les personnes livrées aux exercices gymnastiques
pour l’accroissement de leurs forces. On savoit au juste ce
qu’il falloit pour conserver seulement le corps en bon état ou
pour traiter un malade—pour former un militaire ou pour faire un
athlète—et en particulier, un lutteur, un coureur, un sauteur,
un pugiliste. Une classe d’hommes, les maîtres des gymnases,
étoient exclusivement adonnés à la culture de cet art, auquel
les médecins participoient dans les limites de leur profession,
et Hippocrate, qui dans les Aphorismes, invoque l’exemple des
athlètes, nous parle dans le Traité des Articulations des
personnes maigres, qui n’ayant pas été amaigris par un procédé
régulier de l’art, ont les chairs muqueuses. Les anciens
médecins savoient, comme on le voit, procurer l’amaigrissement
conformément à l’art, et reconnoitre à ses effets un
amaigrissement irrégulier: toutes choses auxquelles nos médecins
sont étrangers, et dont on ne retrouve l’analogue que parmi les
_entraineurs_ Anglois. Au reste cet ensemble de connoissances
empiriques et théoriques doit être mis au rang des pertes
fâcheuses qui ont accompagné la longue et turbulente transition
du monde ancien an monde moderne. Les admirables institutions
destinées dans l’antiquité à développer et affermir le corps,
ont disparu: l’hygiène publique est déstituée à cet égard de
toute direction scientifique et générale, et demeure abandonnée
complètement au hasard.”
See also the remarks of Plato respecting Herodikus, De Republicâ,
iii, p. 406; Aristotel. Politic. iii, 11, 6; iv, 1, 1; viii, 4, 1.
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.[730] Nor was his influence
confined to Kroton. Other towns in Italy and Sicily,—Sybaris,
Metapontum, Rhêgium, 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.[731] And we see that even the disciples of Aristotle, about
the year 300 B. C.,—Aristoxenus, Dikæarchus, Herakleidês 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,[732] 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 B.
C.[733]
[730] Valerius Maxim. viii, 15, xv, 1; Jamblichus, Vit. Pyth. c.
45; Timæus, Fragm. 78, ed. Didot.
[731] Porphyry, Vit. Pythag. c. 21-54; Jamblich. 33-35, 166.
[732] The compilations of Porphyry and Jamblichus on the life
of Pythagoras, copied from a great variety of authors, will
doubtless contain some truth amidst their confused heap of
statements, many incredible, and nearly all unauthenticated. But
it is very difficult to single out what these portions of truth
really are. Even Aristoxenus and Dikæarchus, the best authors
from whom these biographers quote, lived near two centuries
after the death of Pythagoras, and do not appear to have had
any early memorials to consult, nor any better informants than
the contemporary Pythagoreans,—the last of an expiring sect,
and probably among the least eminent for intellect, since the
philosophers of the Sokratic school in its various branches
carried off the acute and aspiring young men of that time.
Meiners, in his Geschichte der Wissenschaften (vol. i, b. iii, p.
191, _seq._), has given a careful analysis of the various authors
from whom the two biographers have borrowed, and a comparative
estimate of their trustworthiness. It is an excellent piece of
historical criticism, though the author exaggerates both the
merits and the influence of the first Pythagoreans: Kiessling, in
the notes to his edition of Jamblichus, has given some extracts
from it, but by no means enough to dispense with the perusal
of the original. I think Meiners allows too much credit, on
the whole, to Aristoxenus (see p. 214), and makes too little
deduction for the various stories, difficult to be believed, of
which Aristoxenus is given as the source: of course the latter
could not furnish better matter than he heard from his own
witnesses. Where Meiners’s judgment is more severe, it is also
better borne out, especially respecting Porphyry himself, and his
scholar Jamblichus. These later Pythagorean philosophers seem to
have set up as a formal canon of credibility, that which many
religious men of antiquity acted upon from a mere unconscious
sentiment and fear of giving offence to the gods,—That it was
_not right to disbelieve any story_ recounted respecting the
gods, and wherein the divine agency was introduced: no one could
tell but what it _might be true_: to deny its truth, was to
set bounds to the divine omnipotence. Accordingly, they made
no difficulty in believing what was recounted about Aristæus,
Abaris, and other eminent subjects of mythes (Jamblichus, Vit.
Pyth. c. 138-148)—καὶ τοῦτό γε πάντες οἱ Πυθαγόρειοι ὅμως ἔχουσι
πιστευτικῶς, οἶον περὶ Ἀρισταίου καὶ Ἀβάριδος τὰ μυθολογούμενα
καὶ ὅσα ἄλλα τοιαῦτα λέγεται ... τῶν τοιούτων δὲ τῶν δοκούντων
μυθικῶν ἀπομνημονεύουσιν, ~ὡς οὐδὲν ἀπιστοῦντες ὅτι ἂν εἰς τὸ
θεῖον ἀναγηται~. Also, not less formally laid down in Jamblichus,
Adhortatio ad Philosophiam, as the fourth Symbolum, p. 324, ed.
Kiessling. Περὶ θεῶν μηδὲν θαυμαστὸν ἀπιστεῖ, μηδὲ περὶ θείων
δογμάτων. Reasoning from their principles, this was a consistent
corollary to lay down; but it helps us to estimate their value as
selectors and discriminators of accounts respecting Pythagoras.
The extravagant compliments paid by the emperor Julian in his
letters to Jamblichus will not suffice to establish the authority
of the latter as a critic and witness: see the Epistolæ 34, 40,
41, in Heyler’s edit. of Julian’s letters.
[733] Aulus Gell. N. A. iv, 11. Apollonius (ap. Jamblich. c. 262)
alludes to τὰ ὑπομνήματα τῶν Κροτωνιατῶν: what the date of these
may be, we do not know, but there is no reason to believe them
anterior to Aristoxenus.
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,[734] 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.[735] 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
Græcia. Such ascendency of the Pythagoreans must have 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.[736]
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.
[734] Thucyd. viii, 54. τὰς ξυνωμοσίας, αἵπερ ἐτύγχανον πρότερον
οὖσαι ἐν τῇ πόλει ἐπὶ δίκαις καὶ ἀρχαῖς, ἁπάσας ἐπελθὼν, etc.
On this important passage, in which Thucydidês notes the
political clubs of Athens as sworn societies,—numerous,
notorious, and efficient,—I shall speak farther in a future stage
of the history. Dr. Arnold has a good note on the passage.
[735] Justin, xx, 4. “Sed trecenti ex juvenibus cum sodalitii
juris sacramento quodam nexi, separatam a ceteris civibus vitam
exercerent, quasi cœtum clandestinæ conjurationis haberent,
civitatem in se converterunt.”
Compare Diogen. Laërt. viii, 3; Apollonius ap. Jamblich. c. 254;
Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. c. 33.
The story of the devoted attachments of the two Pythagoreans
Damon and Phintias appears to be very well attested: Aristoxenus
heard it from the lips of the younger Dionysius the despot, whose
sentence had elicited such manifestation of friendship (Porphyry,
Vit. Pyth. c. 59-62, Cicero, De Officiis, iii, 10; and Davis ad
Cicero, Tusc. Disp. v, 22).
[736] Plutarch, Philosoph. cum Principib. c. i, p. 777. ἂν
δ᾽ ἄρχοντος ἀνδρὸς καὶ πολιτικοῦ καὶ πρακτικοῦ καθάψηται (ὁ
φιλόσοφος) καὶ τοῦτον ἀναπλήσῃ καλοκᾳγαθίας, πολλοὺς δι᾽
ἑνὸς ὠφέλησεν, ὡς Πυθαγόρας τοῖς πρωτεύουσι τῶν Ἰταλιωτῶν
συγγενόμενος.
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 B. C.
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
preëxisting tendencies of Kroton.[737] Niebuhr and O. Müller have
even supposed that the select Three Hundred Pythagoreans constituted
a sort of smaller senate at that city,[738]—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,[739] 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 who 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.
[737] I transcribe here the summary given by Krische, at the
close of his Dissertation on the Pythagorean order, p. 101:
“Societatis scopus fuit mere politicus, ut lapsam optimatium
potestatem non modo in pristinum restitueret, sed firmaret
amplificaretque: cum summo hoc scopo duo conjuncti fuerunt;
moralis alter, alter ad literas spectans. Discipulos suos bonos
probosque homines reddere voluit Pythagoras, et ut civitatem
moderantes potestate suâ non abuterentur ad plebem opprimendam;
et ut plebs, intelligens suis commodis consuli, conditione suâ
contenta esset. Quoniam vero bonum sapiensque moderamen nisi
a prudente literisque exculto viro exspectari (non) licet,
philosophiæ studium necessarium duxit Samius iis, qui ad
civitatis clavum tenendum se accingerent.”
This is the general view (coinciding substantially with that
of O. Müller,—Dorians, iii, 9, 16) given by an author who has
gone through the evidences with care and learning. It differs
on some important points from the idea which I conceive of the
primitive master and his contemporary brethren. It leaves out
the religious ascendency, which I imagine to have stood first
among the means as well as among the premeditated purposes
of Pythagoras, and sets forth a reformatory political scheme
as directly contemplated by him, of which there is no proof.
Though the political ascendency of the early Pythagoreans is
the most prominent feature in their early history, it is not to
be considered as the manifestation of any peculiar or settled
political idea,—it is rather a result of their position and means
of union. Ritter observes, in my opinion more justly: “We must
not believe that the mysteries of the Pythagorean order were of
a simply political character: the most probable accounts warrant
us in considering that its central point was a mystic religious
teaching,” (Geschicht. der Philosophie, b. iv, ch. i, vol. i, pp.
365-368:) compare Hoeck. Kreta, vol. iii, p. 223.
Krische (p. 32) as well as Boeckh (Philolaus, pp. 39-42) and O.
Müller assimilate the Pythagorean life to the Dorian or Spartan
habits, and call the Pythagorean philosophy the expression
of Grecian Dorism, as opposed to the Ionians and the Ionic
philosophy. I confess that I perceive no analogy between the two,
either in action or speculation. The Spartans stand completely
distinct from other Dorians; and even the Spartan habits of
life, though they present some points of resemblance with the
bodily training of the Pythagoreans, exhibit still more important
points of difference, in respect to religious peculiarity and
mysticism, as well as to scientific element embodied with it. The
Pythagorean philosophy, and the Eleatic philosophy, were both
equally opposed to the Ionic; yet neither of them is in any way
connected with Dorian tendencies. Neither Elea nor Kroton were
Doric cities; moreover, Xenophanês as well as Pythagoras were
both Ionians.
The general assertions respecting Ionic mobility and inconstancy,
contrasted with Doric constancy and steadiness, will not be found
borne out by a study of facts. The Dorism of Pythagoras appears
to me a complete fancy. O. Müller even turns Kroton into a Dorian
city, contrary to all evidence.
[738] Niebuhr, Römisch. Gesch. i, p. 165, 2nd edit.; O. Müller,
Hist of Dorians, iii, 9, 16: Krische is opposed to this idea,
sect. v, p. 84.
[739] Varro ap. Augustin. de Ordine, ii, 30; Krische, p. 77.
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,[740]—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.[741] Even
at Athens, however, we shall hereafter see that Sokratês, though
standing really aloof from all party intrigue, incurred much of his
unpopularity from supposed political conjunction with Kritias and
Alkibiadês,[742] to which, indeed, the orator Æschinês distinctly
ascribes his condemnation, speaking about sixty years after the
event. Had Sokratês 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.
[740] Apollonius ap. Jamblichum, V. P. c. 254, 255, 256, 257.
ἡγεμόνες δὲ ἐγένοντο τῆς διαφορᾶς οἱ ταῖς συγγενείαις καὶ ταῖς
~οἰκειότησιν~ ἐγγύτατα καθεστηκότες τῶν Πυθαγορείων. Αἴτιον δ᾽
ἦν, ὅτι τὰ μὲν πολλὰ αὐτοὺς ἐλύπει τῶν πραττομένων, etc.: compare
also the lines descriptive of Pythagoras, c. 259. Τοὺς μὲν
ἑταίρους ἧγεν ἴσους μακάρεσσι θεοῖσι. Τοὺς δ᾽ ἄλλους ἡγεῖτ᾽ οὔτ᾽
ἐν λόγῳ, ἐν ἀριθμῷ.
That this Apollonius, cited both by Jamblichus and by Porphyry,
is Apollonius of Tyana, has been rendered probable by Meiners
(Gesch. der Wissensch. v. i, pp. 239-245): compare Welcker,
Prolegomena ad Theognid. pp. xlv, xlvi.
When we read the life of Apollonius by Philostratus, we see that
the former was himself extremely communicative: he might be the
rather disposed therefore to think that the seclusion and reserve
of Pythagoras was a defect, and to ascribe to it much of the
mischief which afterwards overtook the order.
[741] Schleiermacher observes, that “Philosophy among the
Pythagoreans was connected with political objects, and their
school with a practical brotherly partnership, such as was never
on any other occasion seen in Greece.” (Introduction to his
Translation of Plato, p. 12.) See also Theopompus, Fr. 68, ed.
Didot, apud Athenæum, v, p. 213, and Euripidês, Mêdêa, 294.
[742] Xenophon, Memorab. i, 2, 12; Æschines, cont. Timarch. c.
34. ὑμεῖς, ὦ Ἀθηναῖοι, Σωκράτην μὲν τὸν σοφιστὴν ἀπεκτείνατε, ὅτι
Κριτίαν ἐφάνη πεπαιδευκὼς, ἕνα τῶν τριάκοντα.
It was this cause which brought about the complete and violent
destruction of the Pythagorean order. Their ascendency had provoked
such wide-spread discontent, that their enemies became emboldened
to employ extreme force against them. Kylon and Ninon—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.[743] 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;[744] 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
Græcia,—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 Achæans, 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.[745]
[743] This is stated in Jamblichus, c. 255; yet it is difficult
to believe; for if the fact had been so, the destruction of the
Pythagoreans would naturally have produced an allotment and
permanent occupation of the Sybaritan territory,—which certainly
did not take place, for Sybaris remained without resident
possessors until the foundation of Thurii.
[744] Jamblichus, c, 255-259; Porphyry, c. 54-57; Diogen. Laërt.
viii, 39; Diodor. x, Fragm. vol. iv, p. 56, Wess.
[745] Polyb. ii, 39; Plutarch, De Genio Socratis, c. 13, p. 583;
Aristoxenus, ap. Jamblich. c. 250. That the enemies of the order
attacked it by setting fire to the house in which the members
were assembled, is the circumstance in which all accounts agree.
On all other points there is great discrepancy, especially
respecting the names and dates of the Pythagoreans who escaped:
Boeckh (Philolaus, p. 9, _seq._) and Brandis (Handbuch der Gesch.
Philos. ch. lxxiii, p. 432) try to reconcile these discrepancies.
Aristophanês introduces Strepsiadês, at the close of the Nubes,
as setting fire to the meeting-house (φροντιστήριον) of Sokratês
and his disciples possibly the Pythagorean conflagration may have
suggested this.
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;[746] 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.[747] 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 Græcia,[748] 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.
[746] “Pythagoras Samius suspicione dominatûs injustâ vivus in
fano concrematus est.” (Arnobius adv. Gentes, lib. i, p. 23, ed.
Elmenhorst.)
[747] Cicero, De Finib. v, 2 (who seems to have copied from
Dikæarchus: see Fuhr. ad Dikæarchi Fragment. p. 55); Justin, xx,
4; Diogen. Laërt. viii, 40; Jamblichus, V. P. c. 249.
O. Müller says (Dorians, iii, 9, 16), that “the influence of
the Pythagorean league upon the administration of the Italian
states was of the most beneficial kind, which continued for many
generations after the dissolution of the league itself.”
The first of these two assertions cannot be made out, and depends
only on the statements of later encomiasts, who even supply
materials to contradict their own general view. The judgment
of Welcker respecting the influence of the Pythagoreans, much
less favorable, is at the same time more probable. (Præfat. ad
Theognid. p. xlv.)
The second of the two assertions appears to me quite incorrect;
the influence of the Pythagorean order on the government of
Magna Græcia ceased altogether, as far as we are able to judge.
An individual Pythagorean like Archytas might obtain influence,
but this is not the influence of the order. Nor ought O. Müller
to talk about the Italian Greeks giving up the Doric customs and
adopting an Achæan government. There is nothing to prove that
Kroton ever had Doric customs.
[748] Aristotel. de Cœlo, ii, 13. οἱ περὶ τὴν Ἰταλίαν, καλούμενοι
δὲ Πυθαγορεῖοι. “Italici philosophi quondam nominati.” (Cicero,
De Senect. c. 21.)
It has already been stated that the period when Pythagoras arrived
at Kroton may be fixed somewhere between B. C. 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.[749] 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.
[749] Heyne places the date of the battle of Sagra about 560
B. C.; but this is very uncertain. See his Opuscula, vol. ii,
Prolus. ii, pp. 53, and Prolus. x, p. 184. See also Justin, xx,
3, and Strabo, vi, pp. 261-263. It will be seen that the latter
conceives the battle of the Sagra as having happened after the
destruction of Sybaris by the Krotoniates; for he states twice
that the Krotoniates lost so many citizens at the Sagra, that
the city did not long survive so terrible a blow: he cannot,
therefore, have supposed that the complete triumph of the
Krotoniates over the great Sybaris was gained afterwards.
Of the history of these two great Achæan cities we unfortunately
know very little. Though both were powerful, yet down to the period
of 510 B. C., 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.[750] 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 Têlys had headed a rising against
the oligarchical government, 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;[751] and it appears that he, or 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 Têlys.[752] According to
the narrative given by the later Pythagoreans, those exiles, whom
Têlys 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 Têlys 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.
[750] See above, vol. iii, chap. xxii.
[751] Diodor. xii, 9. Herodotus calls Têlys in one place βασιλῆα,
in another τύραννον of Sybaris (v, 44): this is not at variance
with the story of Diodorus.
The story given by Athenæus, out of Herakleidês Ponticus,
respecting the subversion of the dominion of Têlys, cannot be
reconciled either with Herodotus or Diodorus (Athenæus, xii,
p. 522). Dr. Thirlwall supposes the deposition of Têlys to
have occurred between the defeat at the Traeis and the capture
of Sybaris; but this is inconsistent with the statement of
Herakleidês, and not countenanced by any other evidence.
[752] Herodot. v, 47.
On the demand of the Sybarites being refused, Têlys marched against
Kroton, at the head of a force which is reckoned at three hundred
thousand men.[753] He marched, too, in defiance of the strongest
religious warnings against the enterprise,—for the sacrifices,
offered on his behalf by the Iamid prophet Kallias of Elis, were
decisively unfavorable, and the prophet himself fled in terror
to Kroton.[754] 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 Hêraklês. They were farther reinforced, however, by
a valuable ally, the Spartan Dorieus, younger brother of king
Kleomenês, 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[755] in
the short space of seventy days. The Sybarites fled in great part to
Laos and Skidros,[756] 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,[757] who was among the settlers in
the town of Thurii, afterwards founded, nearly adjoining.
[753] Diodor. xii, 9; Strabo, vi, p. 263; Jamblichus, Vit.
Pythag. c. 260; Skymn. Chi. v, 340.
[754] Herodot. v, 44.
[755] Diodor. xii, 9, 10; Strabo, vi, p. 263.
[756] Herodot. vi, 21; Strabo, vi, p. 253.
[757] Herodot. v, 45; Diodor. xii, 9, 10; Strabo, vi, p. 263.
Strabo mentions expressly the turning of the river for the
purpose of overwhelming the city,—ἐλόντες γὰρ τὴν πόλιν ἐπήγαγον
τὸν ποταμὸν καὶ κατέκλυσαν. It is to this change in the channel
of the river that I refer the expression in Herodotus,—τέμενός
τε καὶ νηὸν ἐόντα ~παρὰ τὸν ξηρὸν~ Κρᾶθιν. It was natural
that the old deserted bed of the river should be called “_the
dry Krathis_:” whereas, if we suppose that there was only one
channel, the expression has no appropriate meaning. For I do not
think that any one can be well satisfied with the explanation
of Bähr “Vocatur Crathis hoc loco ξηρὸς _siccus_, ut qui hieme
fluit, æstatis vero tempore exsiccatus est: quod adhuc in multis
Italiæ inferioris fluviis observant.” I doubt whether this be
true, as a matter of fact, respecting the river Krathis (see my
preceding volume, ch. xxii), but even if the fact were true, the
epithet in Bähr’s sense has no especial significance for the
purpose contemplated by Herodotus, who merely wishes to describe
the site of the temple erected by Dorieus. “Near the Krathis,” or
“near the dry Krathis,” would be equivalent expressions, if we
adopted Bähr’s construction; whereas to say, “near the deserted
channel of the Krathis,” would be a good local designation.
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
B. C. the greatest of all Grecian cities—appears to have excited a
strong sympathy in the Hellenic world. In Milêtus, especially, with
which it had maintained intimate union, the grief was so vehement,
that all the Milesians shaved their heads in token of mourning.[758]
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 Græcia, 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 Xerxês, thirty years after this conquest of
Sybaris, Sparta and Athens send to ask for aid both from Sicily and
Korkyra,—but not from Magna Græcia.
[758] Herodot. vi, 21.
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
Athênê.[759] 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 south-western portion of
Sicily, where he and nearly all his companions perished in a battle
with the Carthaginians and Egestæans,—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, a 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.[760] 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.
[759] Herodot. v, 45.
[760] Herodot. v, 45. Τοῦτο δὲ, αὐτοῦ Δωριέος τὸν θάνατον
μαρτύριον μέγιστον ποιεῦνται (Συβαρῖται), ὅτι παρὰ τὰ
μεμαντευμένα ποιέων διεφθάρῃ. Εἰ γὰρ δὴ μὴ παρέπρηξε μηδὲν, ἐπ᾽
ᾧ δὲ ἐστάλη ἐποίεε, εἷλε ἂν τὴν Ἐρυκίνην χώρην καὶ ἑλὼν κάτεσχε,
οὐδ᾽ ἂν αὐτός τε καὶ ἡ στρατιὴ διεφθάρῃ.
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 Græcia,
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 in a way different from that in which it
is commonly represented. He tells us that after much suffering in
Magna Græcia, from the troubles which followed the expulsion of the
Pythagoreans, the cities were induced by Achæan 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.[761] 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 Græcia in the beginning of the fifth century B. C.
[761] Polyb. ii, 39. Heyne thinks that the agreement here
mentioned by Polybius took place Olymp. 80, 3; or, indeed, after
the repopulation of the Sybaritan territory by the foundation
of Thurii (Opuscula, vol. ii; Prolus. x, p. 189). But there
seems great difficulty in imagining that the state of violent
commotion—which, according to Polybius, was only appeased by this
agreement—can possibly have lasted so long as half a century; the
received date of the overthrow of the Pythagoreans being about
504 B. C.
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 B. C., 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 B. C. He was a
citizen of middling station, born in the Chalkidic colony of Katana
in Sicily,[762] and he framed laws not only for his own city, but for
the other Chalkidic cities in Sicily and Italy,—Leontini, Naxos,
Zanklê, and Rhêgium. The laws and the solemn preamble ascribed to
him by Diodorus and Stobæus, belong to a later day,[763] 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,[764]—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,[765] which we shall find maintained at Athens
throughout the best-known days of Attic law—was first enacted by
Charondas.
[762] Aristot. Politic. ii, 9, 6; iv, 9, 10. Heyne puts Charondas
much earlier than the foundation of Thurii, in which, I think,
he is undoubtedly right: but without determining the date more
exactly (Opuscul. vol. ii; Prolus. ix, p. 160), Charondas must
certainly have been earlier than Anaxilas of Rhêgium and the
great Sicilian despots; which will place him higher than 500 B.
C.: but I do not know that any more precise mark of time can be
found.
[763] Diodorus, xii, 35; Stobæus, Serm. xliv, 20-40; Cicero
de Legg. ii, 6. See K. F. Hermann, Lehrbuch der Griech.
Staatsalterthümer, ch. 89; Heyne, Opuscul. vol. ii, pp. 72-164.
Brandis (Geschichte der Röm. Philosophie, ch. xxvi, p. 102) seems
to conceive these prologues as genuine.
The mistakes and confusion made by ancient writers respecting
these lawgivers—even by writers earlier than Aristotle (Politic.
ii, 9, 5)—are such as we have no means of clearing up.
Seneca (Epist. 90) calls both Zaleukus and Charondas disciples
of Pythagoras. That the former was so, is not to be believed;
but it is not wholly impossible that the latter may have been
so,—or at least that he may have been a companion of the earliest
Pythagoreans.
[764] Aristotel. Politic. ii, 9, 8. Χαρώνδου δ᾽ ἴδιον μὲν οὐδέν
ἐστι πλὴν αἱ δίκαι τῶν ψευδομαρτύρων· πρῶτος γὰρ ἐποίησε τὴν
ἐπίσκηψιν· τῇ δ᾽ ἀκριβείᾳ τῶν νόμων ἐστὶ γλαφυρώτερος καὶ τῶν νῦν
νομοθετῶν. To the fulness and precision predicated respecting
Charondas in the latter part of this passage, I refer the other
passage in Politic. iv, 10, 6, which is not to be construed as
if it meant that Charondas had graduated fines on the rich and
poor with a distinct view to that political trick (of indirectly
eliminating the poor from public duties) which Aristotle had been
just adverting to,—but merely means that Charondas had been nice
and minute in graduating pecuniary penalties generally, having
reference to the wealth or poverty of the person sentenced.
[765] Πρῶτος γὰρ ἐποίησε τὴν ~ἐπίσκηψιν~ (Aristot. Politic. ii,
9, 8). See Harpokration, v. Ἐπεσκήψατο, and Pollux, viii, 33;
Demosthenês cont. Stephanum, ii, c. 5; cont. Euerg. et Mnêsibul.
c. 1. The word ἐπίσκηψις carries with it the solemnity of meaning
adverted to it in the text, and seems to have been used specially
with reference to an action or indictment against perjured
witnesses: which indictment was permitted to be brought with a
less degree of risk or cost to the accuser than most others in
the Attic dikasteries, (Dêmosth. cont. Euerg. et Mn. _l. c._)