unlikely he recalled with pride that he was credited with being
no less an innovator in athletics than in philosophy. At all
events, tradition credits him with the invention of "scientific"
boxing. Was it he, perhaps, who taught the Greeks to strike a
rising and swinging blow from the hip, as depicted in the famous
metopes of the Parthenon? If so, the innovation of Pythagoras was
as little heeded in this regard in a subsequent age as was his
theory of the motion of the earth; for to strike a swinging blow
from the hip, rather than from the shoulder, is a trick which the
pugilist learned anew in our own day.

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.


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