h the Hyperborean Apollo. He himself is said to have
laid claim to the gifts of divination and prophecy. The religious element
was clearly predominant in his character. Grote says of him, "In his
prominent vocation, analogous to that of Epimenides, Orpheus, or Melampus,
he appears as the revealer of a mode of life calculated to raise his
disciples above the level of mankind, and to recommend them to the favour
of the gods." (Hist. of Greece, iv. p. 529.)

On his arrival at Crotona, he formed a school, consisting at first of
three hundred of the richest of the citizens, who bound themselves by a
sort of vow to himself and to each other, for the purpose of cultivating
the ascetic observances which he enjoined, and of studying his religious
and philosophical theories. All that took place in this school was kept a
profound secret; and there were gradations among the pupils themselves,
who were not all admitted, or at all events not at first, to a full
acquaintance with their master's doctrines. They were also required to
submit to a period of probation. The statement of his forbidding his
pupils the use of animal food is denied by many of the best authorities,
and that of his insisting on their maintaining an unbroken silence for
five years, rests on no sufficient authority, and is incredible. It is
beyond our purpose at present to enter into the question of how far the
views of Pythagoras in founding his school or club of three hundred,
tended towards uniting in this body the idea of "at once a philosophical
school, a religious brotherhood, and a political association," all which
characters the Bishop of St. David's (Hist. of Greece, vol. ii. p. 148)
thinks were inseparably united in his mind; while Mr. Grote's view of his
object (Hist. of Greece, vol. iv. p. 544) is very different. In a
political riot at Crotona, a temple, in which many of his disciples were
assembled, was burnt, and they perished, and some say that Pythagoras
himself was among them; though according to other accounts he fled to
Tarentum, and afterwards to Metapontum, where he starved himself to death.
His tomb (see Cic. de Fin. v. 2) was shown at Metapontum down to Cicero's
time. Soon after his death his school was suppressed, and did not revive,
though the Pythagoreans continued to exist as a sect, the members of which
kept up the religious and scientific pursuits of their founder.

Pythagoras is said to have been the first who assumed the title of
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