Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/429

LATER PYTHAGOREANS. 411 reans never revived ; but the dispersed memoers 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 Gracia, 1 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 be- sides at Thebes and other cities of Greece. Indeed, some of these later Pythagoreans sometimes even acquired great political influence, as we see in the case of the Tarentine Archytas, the contemporary of Plato. It has already been stated that the period when Pythagoras arrived at Kroton may be fixed somewhere between 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 infe- rior to themselves in number, at the river Sagra ; and the humil- iation thus brought upon them is said to have rendered them docile to the training of the Samian missionary. 2 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 Tri- onto, about twenty years afterwards. The second of the two assertions appears to me quite incorrect ; the in- fluence of the Pythagorean order on the government of Magna Grsecia ceased altogether, as far as we are able to judge. An individual Pythago- rean like Archytas might obtain influence, but this is not the influence of the order. Nor ought 0. Miiller to talk about the Italian Greeks giving up the Doric customs and adopting an Achaean government. There is nothing to prove that Kroton ever had Doric customs. 1 Aristotel. de Ccelo, ii, 13. ol wept rrjv 'IraAfav, Kahovpevoi 6e Hv&ay- opelot. " Italic! philosophi quondam nominati." ( Cicero, De Senect. p. 21.) 8 Hcyne places the date of the battle of Sagra about 560i 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. 261-2G3. 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 arrive so terrible a blow : he cannot, therefore, have supposed that the complete triumph of the Krotoniates over the great Sybaris was gained fterwards.