dromache, the widow of Hector, fell to him on the
division of the captives after the fall of Troy, and became his wife.

PYTHAGORAS, a celebrated Greek philosopher and founder of a school
named after him Pythagoreans, born at Samos, and who seems to have
flourished between 540 and 500 B.C.; after travels in many lands settled
at Crotona in Magna Graecia, where he founded a fraternity, the members of
which bound themselves in closest ties of friendship to purity of life
and to active co-operation in disseminating and encouraging a kindred
spirit in the community around them, the final aim of it being the
establishment of a model social organisation. He left no writings behind
him, and we know of his philosophy chiefly from the philosophy of his
disciples.

PYTHAGOREANS, the school of philosophy founded by Pythagoras, "the
fundamental thought of which," according to SCHWEGLER, "was that
of proportion and harmony, and this idea is to them as well the principle
of practical life, as the supreme law of the universe." It was a kind of
"arithmetical mysticism, and the leading thought was that law, order, and
agreement obtain in the affairs of Nature, and that these relations are
capable of being expressed in number and in measure." The whole tendency
of the Pythagoreans, in a practical aspect, was ascetic, and aimed only
at a rigid castigation of the moral principle in order thereby to ensure
the emancipation of the soul from its mortal prison-house and its
transmigration into a nobler form. It is with the doctrine of the
transmigration of souls that the Pythagorean philosophy is specially
associated.

PYTHEAS, a celebrated Greek navigator of Massilia, in Gaul, probably
lived in the time of Alexander the Great; in his first voyage visited
Britain and Thule, and in his second coasted along the western shore of
Europe from Cadiz to the Elbe.

PYTHIAN GAMES, celebrated from very early times till the 4th century
A.D. every four years, near Delphi, in honour of Apollo, who was said to
have instituted them to commemorate his victory over the Python;
originally were contests in singing only, but after the middle of the 6th
century B.C. they included instrumental music, contests in poetry and
art, athletic exercises, and horse-racing.

PYTHON, in the Greek mythology a serpent or dragon produced from the
mud left on the earth after the deluge of Deucalion, a brood of sheer
chaos and the dark, who lived in a cave of Parna