onal ambition, he
might, perhaps, have founded a mighty dynasty, and enriched our social
annals with the results of a new experiment. But his was the
ambition, not of a hero, but a sage. He wished rather to establish a
system than to exalt himself; his immediate followers saw not all the
consequences that might be derived from the fraternity he founded: and
the political designs of his gorgeous and august philosophy, only for
a while successful, left behind them but the mummeries of an impotent
freemasonry and the enthusiastic ceremonies of half-witted ascetics.

XVIII. It was when this power, so mystic and so revolutionary, had,
by the means of branch societies, established itself throughout a
considerable portion of Italy, that a general feeling of alarm and
suspicion broke out against the sage and his sectarians. The
anti-Pythagorean risings, according to Porphyry, were sufficiently
numerous and active to be remembered for long generations afterward.
Many of the sage's friends are said to have perished, and it is doubtful
whether Pythagoras himself fell a victim to the rage of his enemies, or
died a fugitive among his disciples at Metapontum. Nor was it until
nearly the whole of Lower Italy was torn by convulsions, and Greece
herself drawn into the contest, as pacificator and arbiter, that the
ferment was allayed--the Pythagorean institutions were abolished, and
the timocratic democracies [242] of the Achaeans rose upon the ruins of
those intellectual but ungenial oligarchies.

XIX. Pythagoras committed a fatal error when, in his attempt to
revolutionize society, he had recourse to aristocracies for his
agents. Revolutions, especially those influenced by religion, can
never be worked out but by popular emotions. It was from this error
of judgment that he enlisted the people against him--for, by the
account of Neanthes, related by Porphyry [243], and, indeed, from all
other testimony, it is clearly evident that to popular, not party
commotion, his fall must be ascribed. It is no less clear that, after
his death, while his philosophical sect remained, his political code
crumbled away. The only seeds sown by philosophers, which spring up
into great states, are those that, whether for good or evil, are
planted in the hearts of the many.

XX. The purely intellectual additions made by Pythagoras to human
wisdom seem to have been vast and permanent. By probable testimony,
he added largely to mathematical scie