ave 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 rem