ly the Chalcidian Rhegium could produce its Ibycus
and the Doric Tarentum its Archytas. With this people, among whom
the spit was for ever turning on the hearth, nothing flourished from
the outset but boxing. The rigid aristocracy which early gained
the helm in the several communities, and which found in case of need
a sure reserve of support in the federal power, prevented the rise
of tyrants; but the danger to be apprehended was that the government
of the best might be converted into a government of the few,
especially if the privileged families in the different communities
should combine to assist each other in carrying out their designs.
Such was the predominant aim in the combination of mutually
pledged "friends" which bore the name of Pythagoras. It enjoined
the principle that the ruling class should be "honoured like gods,"
and that the subject class should be "held in subservience like
beasts," and by such theory and practice provoked a formidable
reaction, which terminated in the annihilation of the Pythagorean
"friends" and the renewal of the ancient federal constitution. But
frantic party feuds, insurrections en masse of the slaves, social
abuses of all sorts, attempts to supply in practice an impracticable
state-philosophy, in short, all the evils of demoralized civilization
never ceased to rage in the Achaean communities, till under the
accumulated pressure their political power utterly broke down.

It is no matter of wonder therefore that the Achaeans settled in
Italy exercised less influence on its civilization than the other
Greek settlements. An agricultural people, they had less occasion
than those engaged in commerce to extend their influence beyond
their political bounds. Within their own dominions they enslaved
the native population and crushed the germs of their national
development as Italians, while they refused to open up to them
by means of complete Hellenization a new career. In this way the
Greek characteristics, which were able elsewhere to retain a vigorous
vitality notwithstanding all political misfortunes, disappeared
more rapidly, more completely, and more ingloriously in Sybaris
and Metapontum, in Croton and Posidonia, than in any other region;
and the bilingual mongrel peoples, that arose in subsequent times
out of the remains of the native Italians and Achaeans and the more
recent immigrants of Sabellian descent, never attained any real
prosperity. This catastrophe, however,