Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/149

Rh P Y T P Y T 137 generally shrank from anything like serious effort and resented his calling upon them for men and money. Rome meantime raised a special war contribution, called on her subjects and allies for their full contingent of troops, and posted strong garrisons in all towns of doubtful fidelity. She was now quite the dominant power in Italy, but her position was critical, as in the north she had had trouble with the Etruscans and Gauls, while in the south the Lucanians and Bruttians were making common cause with Tarentum and the Greek cities. In fact there was the possibility of a most formidable coalition of the Italian peoples both in the north and in the south against Rome, and so Pyrrhus had a good deal on which to build his hopes of success. For the first time in history Greeks and Romans met in battle at Heraclea near the shores of the Gulf of Tarentum, and the cavalry and elephants of Pyrrhus secured for him a complete victory, though at so heavy a loss as to convince him of the great uncertainty of final success. Although he now had the Samnites as well as the Lucanians and Bruttians and all the Greek cities of southern Italy with him, he found every city closed against him as he advanced on Rome through Latium, and his dexterous minister Cineas utterly failed to negotiate a peace, the old blind Appius Claudius declaring in the senate that Rome never negotiated with a foreign enemy on Italian ground. In the second year of the war, 279, Pyrrhus again defeated a Roman army at Asculum (Ascoli) in Apulia, but he was no nearer decisive success, as Rome still had armies in the field and her Italian confederation was not broken up. For a while he quitted Italy for Sicily with the view of making himself the head of the Sicilian Greeks and driving the Cartha- ginians out of the island. In his military operations he was on the whole successful, and Rome and Carthage in face of the common danger concluded an offensive and defensive alliance against him. He passed three years in Sicily, but through want of political tact he gave offence to the Greek cities, which he treated rather too much in the fashion of a despot, not paying any respect to their local constitutions or sufficiently humouring their republican tastes and love of independence. He thus lost a good opportunity of uniting both the Italian and Sicilian Greeks against Rome. On his return to Italy in 276 he had neither men nor money adequately supplied him, as Taren- tum and the other Greek cities had no confidence in him. It is said that he was thoroughly disheartened, and was haunted by mysterious dreams and forebodings which followed on an act which he imagined had involved him in the guilt of sacrilege. He made indeed one more effort, and engaged a Roman army at Beneventum in the Samnite country, but his arrangements for the battle miscarried, and he was defeated with the loss of his camp and the greater part of his army. He had made a fair trial of the strength of Rome and had been utterly baffled. Nothing remained but to go back to his allies at Tarentum. He left a garrison in the city and returned the following year to his home in Epirus after a six years' absence. The brief remainder of his life was passed in camps and battles, without, however, any glorious result. He won a victory over Antigonus Gonatas, king of Macedonia, on Macedonian ground. In 273 he was invited into the Peloponnesus to settle at the sword's point a dispute about the royal succession at Sparta. He besieged the city, but was repulsed with great loss. Next he went to Argos at the invitation of a political faction, and here in the con- fusion of a fight by night in the streets he met his death in his forty-sixth year from the hand of a woman, who hurled a ponderous roof-tile upon his head just at the moment, it is said, when he was striking a blow at her son. Pyrrhus was no doubt a brilliant and dashing soldier, but he was aptly compared " to a gambler who made many good throws with the dice, but could not make the proper use of the game." There was something chivalrous about him which seems to have made him a general favourite. After his death Macedonia had for a time at least nothing to fear, and the liberty of Greece was quite at the mercy of that power. For Pyrrhus, English readers will do well to consult Thirlwall, Greece, vols. vii., viii. ; Mommsen, History of Rome, ii. 7 ; Niebuhr, Lectures on Roman History, lects. 1., li. Plutarch's Life of Pyrrhus is the fullest of our original sources of information, and there is frequent mention of him in Polybius. PYTHAGORAS AND PYTHAGOREANS. Pythagoras is one of those figures which have so impressed the imagina- tion of succeeding times that their historical lineaments are difficult to discern through the mythical haze that envelops them. Animated, as it would appear, not merely by the philosophic thirst for knowledge but also by the enthusiasm of an ethico-religious reformer, he became, centuries after his death, the ideal hero or saint of those who grafted a mystical religious asceticism on the doctrines of Plato. Writings were forged in his name. Lives of him were written which gather up in his person all the traits of the philosophic wise man, and surround him besides with the nimbus of the prophet and wonder-worker. He is described by his Neoplatonic biographers as the favourite and even the son of Apollo, from whom he received his doctrines by the mouth of the Delphic priestess. We read that he had a golden thigh, which he displayed to the assembled Greeks at Olympia, and that on another occasion he was seen in Crotona and Metapontum at one and the same time. He is said to have tamed wild beasts by a word and to have foretold the future, while many stories turn upon the knowledge he was reported to retain of his personality and deeds in former states of existence. Thus, as Zeller truly remarks, the information respecting Pythagoreanism and its founder grows fuller and fuller the farther removed in time it is from its subject. The authentic details of Pythagoras's career, on the other hand, are meagre enough and merely approximate in character. He was a native of Samos, and the first part of his life may therefore be said to belong to that Ionian seaboard which had already witnessed the first development of philosophic thought in Greece. The exact year of his birth has been variously placed between 586 and 569 B.C., but 582 may be taken as the most probable date. Some of the accounts make him the pupil of Anaximander ; but such an assertion lies so ready to hand in the circum- stances of time and place that we cannot build with any assurance upon the suggested connexion with the Ionic school. It is probable, however, that Pythagoras was aware of their speculations, seeing that he left behind him in Ionia the reputation of a learned and universally informed man. " Of all men Pythagoras, the son of Mnesarchus, was the most assiduous inquirer," says Hera- clitus, and then proceeds in his contemptuous fashion to brand his predecessor's wisdom as only eclectically compiled information or polymathy (TroXv^adia). This accumulated wisdom, as well as most of the tenets of the Pythagorean school, was attributed in antiquity to the extensive travels of Pythagoras, which brought him in contact (so it was said) not only with the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Chaldaeans, the Jews, and the Arabians, but also with the Druids of Gaul, the Persian Magi, and the Brahmans. But these tales are told of too many of the early philosophers to be received implicitly ; they represent rather the tendency of a later age to connect the beginnings of Greek speculation with the hoary re- ligions and priesthoods of the East. There is no intrinsic improbability, however, in the statement that Pythagoras visited Egypt and other countries of the Mediterranean, XX. 1 8