Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/431

 DESTRUCTION OF SYBAKIS. 413 at length the persuasion of Pythagoras himself is said to have determined them to risk any hazard sooner than incur the dis- honor of betraying suppliants. On the demand of the Sybarites being refused, 'I elys marched against Kroton, at the head of a force which is reckoned at three hundred thousand men. 1 He marched, too, in defiance of the stron^- ft O est religious warnings against the enterprise, for the sacrifices, offered on his behalf by the lamid prophet Kallias of Elis, were decisively unfavorable, and the prophet himself fled in terror to Kroton.a Near the river Traeis, or Trionto, he was met by the forces of Kroton, consisting, we are informed, of one hundred thousand men, and commanded by the great athlete and Pythag- orean Milo ; who was clothed, we are told, in the costume and armed with the club of Herakles. They were farther reinforced, however, by a valuable ally, the Spartan Dorieus, younger brother of king Kleomenes, then coasting along the gulf of Taren- tum with a body of colonists, intending to found a settlement in Sicily. A bloody battle was fought, in which the Sybarites were totally worsted, with prodigious slaughter ; while the victors, fiercely provoked and giving no quarter, followed up the pursuit to warmly that they took the city, dispersed its inhabitants, and crushed its whole power 3 in the short space of seventy days. The Sybarites fled in great part to Laus and Skidrus, 4 their settlements planted on the Mediterranean coast, across the Cala- brian peninsula. And so eager were the Krotoniates to render the site of Sybaris untenable, that they turned the course of the river Krathis so as to overwhelm and destroy it : the dry bed in which the river had originally flowed was still visible in the time of Herodotus, 5 who was among the settlers in the town of Thurii, afterwards founded, nearly adjoining. 1 Diodor. xii, 9.- Strabo, vi, p. 263; Jamblichus, Vit. Pythag. c. 260- fikymn. Chi. v, 340. * Hcrodot. v, 44. 3 Diodor. xii, 9, 10 ; Strabo, vi, p. 263. 4 Herodot. vi, 21 ; Strabv), vi, p. 253. 6 Herodot. v, 45; Diodor. xii, 9, 10; Strabo, vi, p. 263. Strabo men- tions expressly the turning cf the river for the purpose of overwhelm- fag the city, iZuvrec -yap ifjv KO^IV iirriyayav rov Trorafidv Kal Kars- tlvo-av. It is to this change ia the channel of the river that I refer the sxj>ression in Herodotus, Tt'uTvof re nai vrjuv iovra vapH rbv 18*