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Authors: Kitty Ferguson
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begun to disappear, and the farmlands most vital to the life of Croton’s people were large clayey plains to the south of the city, watered by numerous springs and two more rivers and divided into farmsteads that cultivated wheat and cereals. Other cleared areas to the north were suitable for livestock.
Inevitably a community expected a man like Pythagoras to assume a public role, and he and his associates soon did, either by advising the oligarchical leaders or as part of the oligarchy. They became influential, probably extremely so, not only in the city and its environs but in other communities of the region. Porphyry reported that Pythagoras was so extraordinarily persuasive that Simicus, the tyrant of Centoripa, “heard Pythagoras’s discourse, abdicated his rule, and divided his propertybetween his sister and the citizens.” Local lore still today agrees with the early historians that Pythagoras inspired a love of liberty in the cities of Magna Graecia and restored their individual independence, and that he and his followers were so successful in rooting out partisanship, discord, and sedition, and in establishing just laws, that the cities flourished in peace for several generations and became models for others before again falling into disputes and warfare. “Love of liberty” may be a later ideal attributed with hindsight to the Pythagoreans. Political thinking during Pythagoras’ period in the Greek world saw good government not in terms of how much liberty was allowed but in terms of order and the well-being of the community. 5 Diogenes Laertius had information that Pythagoras gave the Crotonians a constitution, and that he and his followers were an “aristocracy” in the highest, literal sense of the word: “rule by the best.”
In 510 B.C ., twenty years after Pythagoras’ arrival in Croton, Milo, of Olympic wrestling and ox-toting fame and by then a follower of Pythagoras, led Croton’s army against her opulent neighbor Sybaris. Like a latter-day Thales, Milo reputedly exercised his own brand of military hydraulics, diverting the river Crathis to flood the enemy city, and the army of Pythagorean Croton razed Sybaris to the ground. Modern Sibari occupies a different site from Greek Sybaris. Because the more ancient Sybaris perished forever with the defeat by Croton, the archaeological site there, buried beneath a Roman town and part of the Appian Way, has yielded a treasure trove of artifacts. Among them are covered pots from the seventh century B.C . the size of modern sugar bowls, whose lids are decorated with what later would be called Pythagorean triangles. It was a super-wealthy, cultured—indeed, “sybaritic,”—city that Milo destroyed, but though archaeologists have done extensive work, the only trace visible to modern visitors is a water-filled hole beneath excavations of the Roman town.
With Sybaris gone, Croton’s influence and power in the region reached a zenith, and historians credit Pythagoras and the teaching and training he initiated with bringing about this rise in Croton’s fortunes. If Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, and Iamblichus are to be believed—and modern scholarship does not say them nay—he was an ancient example, and arguably the most successful one in history, of Plato’s “philosopher king.”
Or was it all a sham? There is a darker version of the tradition thathas Pythagoras and his followers ruling in an autocratic, repressive way. In this retelling, the war with Sybaris began when Croton, at Pythagoras’ insistence, gave sanctuary to five hundred citizens of Sybaris who had been stripped of their property and banished. A social reform in Sybaris had justifiably confiscated the excessive wealth of these five hundred and distributed it to the poor, and Pythagoras’ sympathy for the formerly rich exiles revealed him in an unfavorable light as a defender of an autocratic and repressive status quo. This story does not actually conflict with the reputed
Inevitably a community expected a man like Pythagoras to assume a public role, and he and his associates soon did, either by advising the oligarchical leaders or as part of the oligarchy. They became influential, probably extremely so, not only in the city and its environs but in other communities of the region. Porphyry reported that Pythagoras was so extraordinarily persuasive that Simicus, the tyrant of Centoripa, “heard Pythagoras’s discourse, abdicated his rule, and divided his propertybetween his sister and the citizens.” Local lore still today agrees with the early historians that Pythagoras inspired a love of liberty in the cities of Magna Graecia and restored their individual independence, and that he and his followers were so successful in rooting out partisanship, discord, and sedition, and in establishing just laws, that the cities flourished in peace for several generations and became models for others before again falling into disputes and warfare. “Love of liberty” may be a later ideal attributed with hindsight to the Pythagoreans. Political thinking during Pythagoras’ period in the Greek world saw good government not in terms of how much liberty was allowed but in terms of order and the well-being of the community. 5 Diogenes Laertius had information that Pythagoras gave the Crotonians a constitution, and that he and his followers were an “aristocracy” in the highest, literal sense of the word: “rule by the best.”
In 510 B.C ., twenty years after Pythagoras’ arrival in Croton, Milo, of Olympic wrestling and ox-toting fame and by then a follower of Pythagoras, led Croton’s army against her opulent neighbor Sybaris. Like a latter-day Thales, Milo reputedly exercised his own brand of military hydraulics, diverting the river Crathis to flood the enemy city, and the army of Pythagorean Croton razed Sybaris to the ground. Modern Sibari occupies a different site from Greek Sybaris. Because the more ancient Sybaris perished forever with the defeat by Croton, the archaeological site there, buried beneath a Roman town and part of the Appian Way, has yielded a treasure trove of artifacts. Among them are covered pots from the seventh century B.C . the size of modern sugar bowls, whose lids are decorated with what later would be called Pythagorean triangles. It was a super-wealthy, cultured—indeed, “sybaritic,”—city that Milo destroyed, but though archaeologists have done extensive work, the only trace visible to modern visitors is a water-filled hole beneath excavations of the Roman town.
With Sybaris gone, Croton’s influence and power in the region reached a zenith, and historians credit Pythagoras and the teaching and training he initiated with bringing about this rise in Croton’s fortunes. If Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, and Iamblichus are to be believed—and modern scholarship does not say them nay—he was an ancient example, and arguably the most successful one in history, of Plato’s “philosopher king.”
Or was it all a sham? There is a darker version of the tradition thathas Pythagoras and his followers ruling in an autocratic, repressive way. In this retelling, the war with Sybaris began when Croton, at Pythagoras’ insistence, gave sanctuary to five hundred citizens of Sybaris who had been stripped of their property and banished. A social reform in Sybaris had justifiably confiscated the excessive wealth of these five hundred and distributed it to the poor, and Pythagoras’ sympathy for the formerly rich exiles revealed him in an unfavorable light as a defender of an autocratic and repressive status quo. This story does not actually conflict with the reputed
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