Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/420

 402 HISTORY OF GREECE. prytanis, or president, while bis wife and daughter were placed at the head of the religious processions of females. 1 Nor was his influence confined to Kroton. Other towns in Italy and Sicily, Sybaris, Metapontum, Rhegium, 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 biog- raphers of Pythagoras are full.'- 2 And we see that even the disciples of Aristotle, about the year 300 B. c., Aristoxenu?, Dika>archus, Herakleides 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 Py- thagoreans, 3 the last members of a declining sect, among whom 1 Valerius Maxim, viii. 15, xv, 1 ; Jamblichus, Vit. Pyth. c. 45 ; Tinueus, Fragm. 78, ed. Didot. 2 Porphyry, Vit. Pythag. c. 21-54 ; Jamblich. 33-35, 166. 3 The compilations of Porphyry and Jamblichus on the life of Pythag- oras, 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 Dika?archus. 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 prob- ably 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 trustwor- thiness. 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 orig- inal. I think Meiners allows too much credit, on the whole, to Aristox- enus (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 Jambli- chus. These later Pythagorean philosophers seem to have set up as a formal canon of credibility, that which many religious men of antiquity tctcd upon from a mere unconscious sentiment and fear of giving offence