If the mistaken affection of the disciples of dreamy Neo-Platonic Gnôsis at Alexandria, in the third or fourth century of our era, has thus made it impossible to separate later legend from original evidence as to what he was, and said, and how he said it, yet that there was a brilliant, perhaps a showy, personality there, infusing the [55] most abstract truths with what would tell on the fancy, seems more than probable, and, though he would appear really to have had from the first much of mystery or mysticism about him, the thaumaturge of Samos, "whom even the vulgar might follow as a conjuror," must have been very unlike the lonely "weeping" philosopher of Ephesus, or the almost disembodied philosopher of Elea. In the very person and doings of this earliest master of the doctrine of harmony, people saw that philosophy is Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute. And in turn he abounded in influence on the deeds, the persons, of others, as if he had really carried a magic lute in his hands to charm them. As his fellow-citizens had all but identified Pythagoras with him, so Apollo remained the peculiar patron of the Pythagoreans; and we may note, in connexion with their influence on Plato, that as Apollo was the chosen ancestral deity, so Pythagoreanism became especially the philosophy, of the severely musical Dorian Greeks. If, as Plato was aware, or fancied, true Spartans knew more of philosophy than they let strangers suppose--turned them all out from time to time and feasted on it in secret, for the strengthening of their souls--it was [56] precisely the Pythagorean philosophy of music, of austere music, mastering, remoulding, men's very bodies, they would then have discussed with one another. A native of Ionia, it is in one of the Dorian cities of Magna Graecia, at Crotona, that Pythagoras finds the fitting scene of his mysterious influence. He founds there something like an ideal republic, or rather a religious brotherhood, under a rule outwardly expressive of that inward idea of order or harmony, so dear to the Dorian soul, and, for it, as for him, ever the peculiar pledge of the presence of philosophic truth. Alêtheian de ametria hêgei syngenê einai, ê emmetria;+ asks one in The Republic; and Emmetria?+ of course, is the answer.