Thus perished the original Pythagorean order. Respecting Pythagoras himself, there were conflicting accounts; some representing that he was burnt in the temple with his disciples;[746] others, that he had died a short time previously; others again affirmed that he was alive at the time, but absent, and that he died not long afterwards in exile, after forty days of voluntary abstinence from food. His tomb was still shown at Metapontum in the days of Cicero.[747] As an active brotherhood, the Pythagoreans never revived; but the dispersed members 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 Græcia,[748] 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 besides 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 inferior to themselves in number, at the river Sagra; and the humiliation thus brought upon them is said to have rendered them docile to the training of the Samian missionary.[749] 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 Trionto, about twenty years afterwards.
Of the history of these two great Achæan cities we unfortunately know very little. Though both were powerful, yet down to the period of 510 B. C., Sybaris seems to have been decidedly the greatest: of its dominion as well as of its much-denounced luxury I have spoken in a former chapter.[750] It was at that time that the war broke out between them which ended in the destruction of Sybaris. It is certain that the Sybaritans were aggressors in the war; but by what causes it had been preceded in their own town, or what provocation they had received, we make out very indistinctly. There had been a political revolution at Sybaris, we are told, not long before, in which a popular leader named Têlys had headed a rising against the oligarchical government, and induced the people to banish five hundred of the leading rich men, as well as to confiscate their properties. He had acquired the sovereignty and become despot of Sybaris;[751] and it appears that he, or his rule at Sybaris, was much abhorred at Kroton,—since the Krotoniate Philippus, a man of splendid muscular form and an Olympic victor, was exiled for having engaged himself to marry the daughter of Têlys.[752] According to the narrative given by the later Pythagoreans, those exiles, whom Têlys had driven from Sybaris, took refuge at Kroton, and cast themselves as suppliants on the altars for protection. It may well be, indeed, that they were in part Pythagoreans of Sybaris. A body of powerful exiles, harbored in a town so close at hand, naturally inspired alarm, and Têlys demanded that they should be delivered up, threatening war in case of refusal. This demand excited consternation at Kroton, since the military strength of Sybaris was decidedly superior. The surrender of the exiles was much debated, and almost decreed, by the Krotoniates, until at length the persuasion of Pythagoras himself is said to have determined them to risk any hazard sooner than incur the dishonor of betraying suppliants.
On the demand of the Sybarites being refused, Têlys marched against Kroton, at the head of a force which is reckoned at three hundred thousand men.[753] He marched, too, in defiance of the strongest religious warnings against the enterprise,—for the sacrifices, offered on his behalf by the Iamid prophet Kallias of Elis, were decisively unfavorable, and the prophet himself fled in terror to Kroton.[754] 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 Pythagorean Milo; who was clothed, we are told, in the costume and armed with the club of Hêraklês. They were farther reinforced, however, by a valuable ally, the Spartan Dorieus, younger brother of king Kleomenês, then coasting along the gulf of Tarentum 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 so warmly that they took the city, dispersed its inhabitants, and crushed its whole power[755] in the short space of seventy days. The Sybarites fled in great part to Laos and Skidros,[756] their settlements planted on the Mediterranean coast, across the Calabrian 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,[757] who was among the settlers in the town of Thurii, afterwards founded, nearly adjoining.
It appears, however, that the Krotoniates for a long time kept the site of Sybaris deserted, refusing even to allot the territory among the body of their own citizens: from which circumstances, as has been before noticed, the commotion against the Pythagorean order is said to have arisen. They may perhaps have been afraid of the name and recollections of the city; wherein no large or permanent establishment was ever formed, until Thurii was established by Athens about sixty-five years afterwards. Nevertheless, the name of the Sybarites did not perish. Having maintained themselves at Laos, Skidros, and elsewhere, they afterwards formed the privileged Old-citizens among the colonists of Thurii; but misbehaved themselves in that capacity, and were mostly either slain or expelled. Even after that, however, the name of Sybaris still remained on a reduced scale in some portion of the territory. Herodotus recounts what he was told by the Sybarites, and we find subsequent indications of them even as late as Theokritus.
The conquest and destruction of the original Sybaris—perhaps in 510 B. C. the greatest of all Grecian cities—appears to have excited a strong sympathy in the Hellenic world. In Milêtus, especially, with which it had maintained intimate union, the grief was so vehement, that all the Milesians shaved their heads in token of mourning.[758] The event happened just at the time of the expulsion of Hippias from Athens, and must have made a sensible revolution in the relations of the Greek cities on the Italian coast with the rustic population of the interior. The Krotoniates might destroy Sybaris, and disperse its inhabitants, but they could not succeed to its wide dominion over dependent territory; and the extinction of this great aggregate power, stretching across the peninsula from sea to sea, lessened the means of resistance against the Oscan movements from the inland. From this time forward, the cities of Magna Græcia, as well as those of Ionia, tend to decline in consequence, while Athens, on the other hand, becomes both more conspicuous and more powerful. At the invasion of Greece by Xerxês, thirty years after this conquest of Sybaris, Sparta and Athens send to ask for aid both from Sicily and Korkyra,—but not from Magna Græcia.
It is much to be regretted that we do not possess fuller information respecting these important changes among the Greco-Italian cities, but we may remark that even Herodotus,—himself a citizen of Thurii, and dwelling on the spot not more than eighty years after the capture of Sybaris,—evidently found no written memorials to consult; and could obtain from verbal conversation nothing better than statements both meagre and contradictory. The material circumstance, for example, of the aid rendered by the Spartan Dorieus and his colonists, though positively asserted by the Sybarites, was as positively denied by the Krotoniates, who alleged that they had accomplished the conquest by themselves, and with their own unaided forces. There can be little hesitation in crediting the affirmative assertion of the Sybarites, who showed to Herodotus a temple and precinct erected by the Spartan prince in testimony of his share in the victory, on the banks of the dry, deserted channel, out of which the Krathis had been turned, and in honor of the Krathian Athênê.[759] This of itself forms a proof, coupled with the positive assertion of the Sybarites, sufficient for the case. But they produced another indirect argument to confirm it, which deserves notice. Dorieus had attacked Sybaris while he was passing along the coast of Italy to go and found a colony in Sicily, under the express mandate and encouragement of the oracle; and after tarrying awhile at Sybaris, he pursued his journey to the south-western portion of Sicily, where he and nearly all his companions perished in a battle with the Carthaginians and Egestæans,—though the oracle had promised him that he should acquire and occupy permanently the neighboring territory near Mount Eryx. Now the Sybarites deduced from this fatal disaster of Dorieus and his expedition, combined with the favorable promise of the oracle beforehand, a confident proof of the correctness of their own statement that he had fought at Sybaris. For if he had gone straight to the territory marked out by the oracle, they argued, without turning aside for any other object, the prophecy on which his hopes were founded would have been unquestionably realized, and he would have succeeded; but the ruinous disappointment which actually overtook him was at once explained, and the truth of prophecy vindicated, when it was recollected that he had turned aside to help the Krotoniates against Sybaris, and thus set at nought the conditions prescribed to him. Upon this argument, Herodotus tells us, the Sybarites of his day especially insisted.[760] And while we note their pious and literal faith in the communications of an inspired prophet, we must at the same time observe how perfectly that faith supplied the place of historical premises,—how scanty their stock was of such legitimate evidence,—and how little they had yet learned to appreciate its value.
It is to be remarked, that Herodotus, in his brief mention of the fatal war between Sybaris and Kroton, does not make the least allusion to Pythagoras or his brotherhood. The least which we can infer from such silence is, that the part which they played in reference to the war, and their general ascendency in Magna Græcia, was in reality less conspicuous and overruling than the Pythagorean historians set forth. Even making such allowance, however, the absence of all allusion in Herodotus, to the commotions which accompanied the subversion of the Pythagoreans, is a surprising circumstance. Nor can I pass over a perplexing statement in Polybius, which seems to show that he too must have conceived the history of Sybaris in a way different from that in which it is commonly represented. He tells us that after much suffering in Magna Græcia, from the troubles which followed the expulsion of the Pythagoreans, the cities were induced by Achæan mediation to come to an accommodation, and even to establish something like a permanent league, with a common temple and sacrifices. Now the three cities which he specifies as having been the first to do this, are Kroton, Sybaris, and Kaulonia.[761] But according to the sequence of events and the fatal war, just described, between Kroton and Sybaris, the latter city must have been at that time in ruins; little, if at all, inhabited. I cannot but infer from this statement of Polybius, that he followed different authorities respecting the early history of Magna Græcia in the beginning of the fifth century B. C.
Indeed, the early history of these cities gives us little more than a few isolated facts and names. With regard to their legislators, Zaleukus and Charondas, nothing is made out except their existence,—and even that fact some ancient critics contested. Of Zaleukus, whom chronologists place in 664 B. C., I have already spoken; the date of Charondas cannot be assigned, but we may perhaps presume that it was at some time between 600-500 B. C. He was a citizen of middling station, born in the Chalkidic colony of Katana in Sicily,[762] and he framed laws not only for his own city, but for the other Chalkidic cities in Sicily and Italy,—Leontini, Naxos, Zanklê, and Rhêgium. The laws and the solemn preamble ascribed to him by Diodorus and Stobæus, belong to a later day,[763] and we are obliged to content ourselves with collecting the brief hints of Aristotle, who tells us that the laws of Charondas descended to great minuteness of distinction and specification, especially in graduating the fine for offences according to the property of the guilty person fined,[764]—but that there was nothing in his laws strictly original and peculiar, except that he was the first to introduce the solemn indictment against perjured witnesses before justice. The perjured witness, in Grecian ideas, was looked upon as having committed a crime half religious, half civil; and the indictment raised against him, known by a peculiar name, partook of both characters, approaching in some respects to the procedure against a murderer. Such distinct form of indictment against perjured testimony—with its appropriate name,[765] which we shall find maintained at Athens throughout the best-known days of Attic law—was first enacted by Charondas.