Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/410

g92 HISTORY OF GREECE. Syros. 1 Amidst the towns of Ionia, he would, moreover, hav 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 com- bined stimulus, partly towards an imaginative and religious vein of speculation, with a life of mystic observance, partly towards that active exercise, both of mind and body, which the genius of an Hellenic community so naturally tended to suggest. Of the personal doctrines or opinions of Pythagoras, whom we must distinguish from Philolaus and the subsequent Pythagorean?, we have little certain knowledge, though doubtless the first germ of their geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, etc. must have pro- ceeded from him. But that he believed in the metempsychosis or transmigration of the souls of deceased men into other men, as well as into animals, we know, not only by other evidence, but also by the testimony of his contemporary, the philosopher Xenophanes of Elea. Pythagoras, seeing a dog beaten, ana 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 H.>rakleitus, that Pythagoras was a man of extensive research and acquired instruction, but artful for mischief and destitute of sound judg- ment is all that we know about him from contemporaries. Herodotus, two generations afterwards, w r hile he conceives the Pythagoreans as a peculiar religious order, intimates that both Orpheus and Pythagoras had derived the doctrine of the metem- psychosis from Egypt, but had pretended to it as their own without acknowledgment. 2 1 The connection of Pythagoras with Pherekydes is noticed by Aristox- enus ap. Diogen. Laert. i, 118, viii, 2; Cicero de Divinat. i, 13. 2 Xenophanes, Fragm. 7, ed. Schneidewin ; Diogen. Laert. viii, 36 : com- pare Aulus Gellius. iv, 11 (we must remark that this or a like doctrine is not peculiar to Pythagoreans, but believed by the poet Pindar, Olyirp. ii, C8. and Fragment, Thren. x, as well as by the philosopher Pherekydcs, Porphyrius le Antro Nympharum, c. 31). Ka/' TTOTE piv OTvfyeTu&fievov aKvlanos Trapiovra $ualv iTtoiKTeipai, nal rode (puatiai ITTCH; Tlaijoat, ftii&e purci^' IKEITJ <t>i?.ov uvrpof tori i'v^, rrjv eyvuv QftcyZajiEVTif uiuv. Consult also Sextus Empiricus, viii, 286, as to the Koivuvia between gods,