“Man’s life needs greatly Number’s ordered sway: His path is safe who follows Number’s way.”[69] But the Pythagorean doctrine of Transmigration probably had a greater ethical value than the metaphysical conceptions of Number which constituted the Pythagorean οὐσία; although it is not impossible that the dogma, when carelessly held or unphilosophically interpreted, might have a vicious rather than a virtuous effect.[70] The “Golden Verses of Pythagoras,” whether composed by any individual member of the school, or officially embodying the teaching of the sect, or representing the actual work of some philosopher not formally a Pythagorean, have been universally recognised to express a Pythagorean ideal;[71] and thus 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.[72] Among the philosophers of the Eleatic School we find an equally marked tendency in the direction of Ethics. The very basis of the anti-theistic propaganda of Xenophanes is that the gods in their traditional character do not display those virtues which are incumbent on even ordinarily decent men. To his strenuous sincerity the removal of the gods from the sphere of human conduct meant the introduction of a stricter and better reasoned sanction for morality. Even Parmenides and Melissus and Zeno were not so absorbed in the creation of abstract metaphysical conceptions but that Plutarch is able to mention them together, not only as distinguished for their contributions to the practical wisdom of their time, but as evincing by the manner of their death their constancy to a lofty ethical conception of the duties of life.[73] Empedocles is included in the same category as having conferred great material and political benefits upon his fellow-citizens, to whom he also addressed a poem inculcating a pure and noble manner of life based on the doctrine of Transmigration.