And these indeed were such as philosophized. But the greatest part of
his disciples consisted of auditors whom they call _Acusmatici_, who on
his first arrival in Italy, according to Nicomachus, being captivated by
one popular oration alone, exceeded two thousand in number. These, with
their wives and children, being collected into one very large and common
auditory, called Homacoïon, and which for its magnitude resembled a
city, founded a place which was universally called Magna Græcia. This
great multitude of people likewise, receiving laws and mandates from
Pythagoras as so many divine precepts, and without which they engaged in
no occupation, dwelt together with the greatest general concord,
celebrated and ranked by their neighbours among the number of the
blessed. At the same time, as we have already observed, they shared
their possessions in common. Such also was their reverence for
Pythagoras, that they numbered him with the Gods, as a certain
beneficent and most philanthropic dæmon. And some indeed celebrated him
as the Pythian, but others as the Hyperborean Apollo. Some again
considered him as Pæon, but others as one of the dæmons that inhabit the
moon; and others celebrated him as one of the Olympian Gods,[11] who, in
order to benefit and correct the mortal life, appeared to the men of
those times in a human form, in order that he might extend to them the
salutary light of felicity and philosophy. And indeed a greater good
never came, nor ever will come to mankind, than that which was imparted
by the Gods through this Pythagoras. Hence, even now the proverb of _the
long-haired Samian_, is applied to the most venerable man. But Aristotle
relates, in his Treatise On the Pythagoric Philosophy, that such a
division as the following was preserved by the Pythagoreans among their
principal arcana; viz. that of rational animals one kind is a God,
another man, and another such as Pythagoras. And indeed they very
reasonably apprehended him to be a being of this kind, through whom a
right conception and conformable to things themselves was introduced of
Gods, heroes, and dæmons; of the world, the all-various motion of the
spheres and stars, their oppositions, eclipses, and inequalities, their
eccentricities and epicycles; of all the natures contained in the
heavens and the earth, together with those that have an intermediate
subsistence, whether apparent or occult. Nor was there anything (in all
this variety of information) at all contrary to the phenomena, or the
conceptions of intellect. To which we may add, that all such
disciplines, theories, and scientific investigations, as truly
invigorate the eye of the soul, and purify the intellect from the
blindness introduced by studies of a different kind, so as to enable it
to perceive the true principles and causes of the universe, were
unfolded by Pythagoras to the Greeks. But besides all this, the best
polity, popular concord, community of possessions among friends, the
worship of the gods, piety to the dead, legislation, erudition, silence,
abstinence from animals, continence, temperance, sagacity, divinity, and
in one word, whatever is anxiously sought after by the lovers of
learning, was brought to light by Pythagoras. On all these accounts,
therefore, as I have just now said, he was (every where) so
transcendently admired.