exhibit in the doctrine of the Italian School a far more vigorous and fruitful ethical tendency than any study of its official doctrines—so far as they are available for study—would lead us to suppose. And, indeed, the followers of this Philosophy were conspicuous, even in Plato's time, for a special manner of life, the preparation for which involved a strenuous devotion to a strict and lofty ethical ideal, an ideal which subsequently formed no small part of the strength of that last school of Greek Philosophy which nominally sheltered under the ægis of Plato.[1]
Among the philosophers of the Eleatic School we find an equally marked tendency in the direction of
- [Footnote: antiquité, mais il est certainement antérieur au christianisme, puisque
des écrivains qui ont vécu avant notre ère, entre autres le Stoïcien Chrysippe, y ont fait quelquefois allusion . . . Hieroclès dit formellement que les Vers d'or ne sont pas l'œuvre d'un homme, mais celle de tout le sacré collège pythagoricien."—The author of the verses is, doubtless, unknown, but their general attribution in antiquity to a Pythagorean source is in harmony with the universal recognition that they cohere with the ethical doctrine of the school. M. Martha subjects ancient philosophers and critics to a severe reprehension on the ground that they saw in these verses a mere inculcation of the practice of the memory—"Un certain nombre d'anciens sont tombés dans la plus étrange meprise. Ils ont cru qu'il s'agissait ici d'un exercice de mémoire." But, giving all the force which M. Martha assigns to the passages he quotes in support of this view, we must not leave out of consideration the important part which a good memory was believed to subserve in practical ethics. See the pseudo-Plutarchic tract De Educatione Liberorum, 9 F. Cf. Epictetus, lib. iii. cap x.
Seneca (De Ira, 3, cap. 36) learned the practice inculcated by the golden verses from Sextus, who was claimed as a Pythagorean (Ritter and Preller, 437).]
- ↑ Plato: Republic, 600 B.
