How is she become a desolation! It is indeed hard to realize that a
town thronged with citizens covered all this area. Yet so it is. Every
footstep is a memory. Along this very track walked the sumptuous ladies
of Croton on their way to deposit their vain jewels before the goddess
Hera, at the bidding of Pythagoras. On this spot, maybe, stood that
public hall which was specially built for the delivery of his lectures.
No doubt the townsfolk had been sunk in apathetic luxury; the time was
ripe for a Messiah.
And lo! he appeared.
XXXVIII
THE SAGE OF CROTON
The popularity of this sage at Croton offers no problem: the inhabitants
had become sufficiently civilized to appreciate the charm of being
regenerated. We all do. Renunciation has always exercised an
irresistible attraction for good society; it makes us feel so
comfortable, to be told we are going to hell - and Pythagoras was very
eloquent on the subject of Tartarus as a punishment. The Crotoniates
discovered in repentance of sins a new and subtle form of pleasure;
exactly as did the Florentines, when Savonarola appeared on the scene.
Next: his doctrines found a ready soil in Magna Graecia which was
already impregnated with certain vague notions akin to those he
introduced. And then - he permitted and even encouraged the emotional sex
to participate in the mysteries; the same tactics that later on
materially helped the triumph of Christianity over the more exclusive
and rational cult of Mithra. Lastly, he came with a "message," like the
Apostle of the Gentiles; and in those times a preaching reformer was a
novelty. That added a zest. We know them a little better, nowadays.
He enjoyed the specious and short-lived success that has attended,
elsewhere, such efforts to cultivate the ego at the expense of its
environment. "A type of aspiring humanity," says Gissing, echoing the
sentiments of many of us, "a sweet and noble figure, moving as a dim
radiance through legendary Hellas." I fancy that the mist of centuries
of undiscriminating admiration has magnified this figure out of all
proportion and contrived, furthermore, to fix an iridescent nimbus of
sanctity about its head. Such things have been known to happen, in foggy
weather.
Was Greece so very legendary, in those times? Why, on the contrary, it
was full of real personages, of true sages to whom it seemed as if no
secrets of heaven or earth were past fathoming; far from being
legendary, the countryhad never attained a higher plane of intellectual
curiosity than when Pythagoras made his appearance. And it cannot be
gainsaid that he and his disciples gave the impetus away from these wise
and beneficial researches into the arid regions of metaphysics. It is so
much more gentlemanly (and so much easier) to talk bland balderdash
about soul-migrations than to calculate an eclipse of the moon or bother
about the circulation of the blood.
