In this way their political influence was broken, and their assemblies suppressed; but the effect of Pythagoras' teaching was not lost. His followers, scattered abroad throughout the Hellenic world, carried his precepts and his life-ideal with them. In the following centuries they found many noble sympathizers--Pindar, Socrates, Plato, Epicharmus, etc.--and underwent many modifications, until they finally witnessed a resurrection, in the forms of Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism, after the Christian era. In these later guises, Pythagoreanism lost itself in mysticism and contemplation, turning its followers into inactive ascetics; but in its original form it seems to have been especially adapted to produce men of vigorous action and far-sighted practicality. Milo of Croton, the inimitable wrestler; Archytas of Tarentum, philosopher, mathematician, musician, inventor, engineer, general, statesman; and Epaminondas, the greatest and noblest of Theban generals, were professed Pythagoreans. We might perhaps express the aim of Pythagoras' pedagogical efforts by the one word HARMONY. Just as he found harmony everywhere in the physical world, so he strove to introduce the same into the constitution of the human individual, and into the relations of individuals with each other. He may perhaps be regarded as the originator of that view of the world, of men, and of society which makes all good consist in order and proportion, a view which recommends itself strongly to idealists, and has given birth to all those social Utopias, whose static perfection seems to relieve the individual from the burden of responsibility, and which have been dangled before the eyes of struggling humanity from his days to ours. According to this view, which had its roots in Greek thought generally, the aim of education is to find for each individual his true place and to make him efficient therein. Man is made for order, and not order for man. He is born into a world of order, as is shown by the fact that number and proportion are found in everything that is known. Pythagoras, in his enthusiasm for his principle, carried his doctrine of numbers to absurd lengths, identifying them with real things; but this enthusiasm was not without its valuable results, since it is to Pythagoras and his school that we owe the sciences of geometry and music. Moreover, experience must have taught him that it is one thing to propound a theory, another to make it effective in regulating human relations. In order to accomplish the latter object, he invoked the aid of divine authority and of the doctrines of metempsychosis and future retribution. Hence his educational system had a strong religious cast, which showed itself even outwardly in the dignified demeanor and quiet self-possession of his followers.