It has been asserted that he had already abandoned the orthodox diet at the age of nineteen or twenty. If this was actually the fact, he has the additional merit of having adopted the higher life by his own original force of mind and refinement of feeling. If not, he may have derived the most characteristic as well as the most important of his teachings from the Egyptians or Persians, or, through them, even from the Hindus--the most religiously strict abstainers from the flesh of animals. It is remarkable that the two great apostles of abstinence--Pythagoras and Sakya-Muni, or Buddha--were almost contemporaries; nor is it impossible that the Greek may, in whatever way, have become acquainted with the sublime tenets of the Hindu prophet, who had lately seceded from Brahminism, the established sacerdotal and exclusive religion of the Peninsula, and promulgated his great revelation--until then new to the world--that religion, at least his religion, was to be “a religion of mercy to all beings,” human and non-human.[7] As the natural and necessary result of his pure living, we are told by Iamblichus that “his sleep was brief, his soul vigilant and pure, and his body confirmed in a state of perfect and invariable health.” He appears to have passed the period of middle life when he returned to Samos, where his reputation had preceded him. Either, however, finding his countrymen hopelessly debased by the corrupting influence of despotism, or believing that he would find a better field for the propagandism of his new revelation, he not long afterwards set out for Southern Italy, then known as “Great Greece,” by reason of its numerous Greek colonies, or, rather, autonomous communities. At Krotona his fame and eloquence soon attracted, it seems, a select if not numerous auditory; and there he founded his famous society--the first historical anti-flesh-eating association in the western world--the prototype, in some respects, of the ascetic establishments of Greek and Catholic Christendom. It consisted of about three hundred young men belonging to the most influential families of the city and neighbourhood.