But enough of pugilism and of what, at best, is a doubtful tradition. Our concern is with another “science” than that of the arena. We must follow the purple-robed victor to Italy–if, indeed, we be not over-credulous in accepting the tradition–and learn of triumphs of a different kind that have placed the name of Pythagoras high on the list of the fathers of Grecian thought.
To Italy? Yes, to the western limits of the Greek world. Here it was, beyond the confines of actual Greek territory, that Hellenic thought found its second home, its first home being, as we have seen, in Asia Minor. Pythagoras, indeed, to whom we have just been introduced, was born on the island of Samos, which lies near the coast of Asia Minor, but he probably migrated at an early day to Crotona, in Italy. There he lived, taught, and developed his philosophy until rather late in life, when, having incurred the displeasure of his fellow-citizens, he suffered the not unusual penalty of banishment.
Of the three other great Italic leaders of thought of the early period, Xenophanes came rather late in life to Elea and founded the famous Eleatic School, of which Parmenides became the most distinguished ornament. These two were Ionians, and they lived in the sixth century before our era. Empedocles, the Sicilian, was of Doric origin. He lived about the middle of the fifth century B.C., at a time, therefore, when Athens had attained a position of chief glory among the Greek states; but there is no evidence that Empedocles ever visited that city, though it was rumored that he returned to the Peloponnesus to die. The other great Italic philosophers just named, living, as we have seen, in the previous century, can scarcely have thought of Athens as a centre of Greek thought. Indeed, the very fact that these men lived in Italy made that peninsula, rather than the mother-land of Greece, the centre of Hellenic influence. But all these men, it must constantly be borne in mind, were Greeks by birth and language, fully recognized as such in their own time and by posterity. Yet the fact that they lived in a land which was at no time a part of
the geographical territory of Greece must not be forgotten. They, or their ancestors of recent generations, had been pioneers among those venturesome colonists who reached out into distant portions of the world, and made homes for themselves in much the same spirit in which colonists from Europe began to populate America some two thousand years later. In general, colonists from the different parts of Greece localized themselves somewhat definitely in their new homes; yet there must naturally have been a good deal of commingling among the various families of pioneers, and, to a certain extent, a mingling also with the earlier inhabitants of the country. This racial mingling, combined with the well-known vitalizing influence of the pioneer life, led, we may suppose, to a more rapid and more varied development than occurred among the home-staying Greeks. In proof of this, witness the remarkable schools of philosophy which, as we have seen, were thus developed at the confines of the Greek world, and which were presently to invade and, as it were, take by storm the mother-country itself.
As to the personality of these pioneer philosophers of the West, our knowledge is for the most part more or less traditional. What has been said of Thales may be repeated, in the main, regarding Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles. That they were real persons is not at all in question, but much that is merely traditional has come to be associated with their names.
Pythagoras was the senior, and doubtless his ideas may have influenced the others more or less, though each is usually spoken of as the founder of an independent school. Much confusion has all along existed, however, as to the precise ideas which were to be ascribed to each of the leaders. Numberless commentators, indeed, have endeavored to pick out from among the traditions of antiquity, aided by such fragments, of the writing of the philosophers as have come down to us, the particular ideas that characterized each thinker, and to weave these ideas into systems. But such efforts, notwithstanding the mental energy that has been expended upon them, were, of necessity, futile, since, in the first place, the ancient philosophers themselves did not specialize and systematize their ideas according to modern notions, and, in the second place, the records of their individual teachings have been too scantily preserved to serve for the purpose of classification. It is freely admitted that fable has woven an impenetrable mesh of contradictions about the personalities of these ancient thinkers, and it would be folly to hope that this same artificer had been less busy with their beliefs and theories. When one reads that Pythagoras advocated an exclusively vegetable diet, yet that he was the first to train athletes on meat diet; that he sacrificed only inanimate things, yet that he offered up a hundred oxen in honor of his great discovery regarding the sides of a triangle, and such like inconsistencies in the same biography, one gains a realizing sense of the extent to which diverse traditions enter into the story as it has come down to us. And yet we must reflect that most men change their opinions in the course of a long lifetime, and that the antagonistic reports may both be true.