[7] His moral principles are reduced to these:—“1. Mercy established on an immovable basis. 2. Aversion to all cruelty. 3. A boundless compassion for all creatures.” Quoted from Klaproth by Huc, Chinese Empire, xv. Buddhism was to Brahminism, sacerdotally, what early Christianity was to Mosaism.
[8] All the varieties of the bear tribe, it is perhaps scarcely necessary to observe, are by organisation, and therefore by preference, frugivorous. It is from necessity only, for the most part, that they seek for flesh.
[9] Compare Montaigne (Essais, Book II., chap. 12), who, to the shame of the popular opinion of the present day, ably maintains the same thesis.
[10] The allegory of the trials and final purification of the soul was a favourite one with the Greeks, in the charming story of the loves and sorrows of Psyche and Eros. Apuleius inserted it in his fiction of The Golden Ass, and it constantly occurs in Greek and modern art.
[11] Beans, like lean flesh, are very nitrogenous, and it is possible that Pythagoras may have deemed them too invigorating a diet for the more aspiring ascetics. This may seem at least a more solid reason than the absurd conjectures to which we have referred.
[12] “As regards the fruits of this system of training or belief (the Pythagorean), it is interesting to remark,” says the author of the article Pythagoras in Dr. Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, “that, wherever we have notices of distinguished Pythagoreans, we usually hear of them as men of great uprightness, conscientiousness, and self-restraint, and as capable of devoted and enduring friendship.” Amongst them the names of Archytas, and Damon, and Phintias are particularly eminent. Archytas was one of the very greatest geniuses of antiquity: he was distinguished alike as a philosopher, mathematician, statesman, and general. In mechanics he was the inventor of the wooden flying dove—one of the wonders of the older world. Empedokles (the Apollonius of the 5th century B.C.), who devoted his marvellous attainments to the service of humanity, may be claimed as, at least in part, a follower of Pythagoras.
[13] “Quæ Philosophia fuit, facta Philologia est.” (Ep. cviii.) Compare Montaigne, Essais, i., 24, on Pedantry, where he admirably distinguishes between wisdom and learning.
[14] The Republic of Plato. By Davies and Vaughan.
[15] In support of this thesis Plato adduces arguments derived from analogy. Amongst the non-human species the sexes, he points out, are nearly equal in strength and intelligence. In human savage life the difference is far less marked than in artificial conditions of life.
[16] Ὄψον—the name given by the Greeks generally to everything which they considered rather as a “relish” than a necessary. Bread was held to be—not only in name but in fact—the veritable “staff of life.” Olives, figs, cheese, and, at Athens especially, fish were the ordinary Ὄψον.