For the “mystic silence,” see Aristoxenos, _ap._ Diog. viii. 15 (R. P. 55 a). Tannery, “Sur le secret dans l’école de Pythagore” (_Arch._ i. pp. 28 sqq.), thinks that the mathematical doctrines were the secrets of the school, and that these were divulged by Hippasos; but the most reasonable view is that there were no secrets at all except of a ritual kind. The Pythagorean Order was simply, in its origin, a religious fraternity of the type described above, and not, as has sometimes been maintained, a political league.[202] Nor had it anything to do with the “Dorian aristocratic ideal.” Pythagoras was an Ionian, and the Order was originally confined to Achaian states.[203] Nor is there the slightest evidence that the Pythagoreans favoured the aristocratic rather than the democratic party.[204] The main purpose of the Order was to secure for its own members a more adequate satisfaction of the religious instinct than that supplied by the State religion. It was, in fact, an institution for the cultivation of holiness. In this respect it resembled an Orphic society, though it seems that Apollo, rather than Dionysos, was the chief Pythagorean god. That is doubtless why the Krotoniates identified Pythagoras with Apollo Hyperboreios.[205] From the nature of the case, however, an independent society within a Greek state was apt to be brought into conflict with the larger body. The only way in which it could then assert its right to exist was by identifying the State with itself, that is, by securing the control of the sovereign power. The history of the Pythagorean Order, so far as it can be traced, is, accordingly, the history of an attempt to supersede the State; and its political action is to be explained as a mere incident of that attempt. Footnote 202: Plato, _Rep._ x. 600 a, implies that Pythagoras held no public office. The view that the Pythagorean sect was a political league, maintained in modern times by Krische (_De societatis a Pythagora conditae scopo politico_, 1830), goes back, as Rohde has shown (_loc. cit._), to Dikaiarchos, the champion of the “Practical Life,” just as the view that it was primarily a scientific society goes back to the mathematician and musician Aristoxenos. The former antedated Archytas, just as the latter antedated Philolaos (see Chap. VII. § 138). Grote’s good sense enabled him to see this quite clearly (vol. iv. pp. 329 sqq.). Footnote 203: