The order, the moral discipline which characterized them, the common intercourse of men, did not, however, endure long; for even in Pythagoras’ life-time the affairs of his league must have become involved, since he found enemies who forcibly overthrew him. He drew down upon him, it is said, the envy of others, and was accused of thinking differently from what he seemed to indicate, and thus of having an _arrière pensée_. The real fact of the case was that the individual belonged, not entirely to his town, but also to another. In this catastrophe, Pythagoras himself, according to Tennemann (Vol. I. p. 414), met his death in the 69th Olympiad (504, B.C.) in a rising of the people against these aristocrats; but it is uncertain whether it happened in Crotona or in Metapontum, or in a war between the Syracusans and the Agrigentines. There is also much difference of opinion about the age of Pythagoras, for it is given sometimes as 80, and sometimes as 104.[39] For the rest, the unity of the Pythagorean school, the friendship of the members, and the connecting bond of culture have even in later times remained, but not in the formal character of a league, because what is external must pass away. The history of Magna Græcia is in general little known, but even in Plato’s[40] time we find Pythagoreans appearing at the head of states or as a political power. The Pythagorean brotherhood had no relation with Greek public and religious life, and therefore could not endure for long: in Egypt and in Asia exclusiveness and priestly influence have their home, but Greece, in its freedom, could not let the Eastern separation of caste exist. Freedom here is the principle of civic life, but still it is not yet determined as principle in the relations of public and private law. With us the individual is free since all are alike before the law; diversity in customs, in political relations and opinions may thus exist, and must indeed so do in organic states. In democratic Greece, on the contrary, manners, the external mode of life, necessarily preserved a certain similarity, and the stamp of similarity remained impressed on these wider spheres; for the exceptional condition of the Pythagoreans, who could not take their part as free citizens, but were dependent on the plans and ends of a combination and led an exclusive religious life, there was no place in Greece. The preservation of the mysteries certainly belonged to the Eumolpidæ, and other special forms of worship to other particular families, but they were not regarded in a political sense as of fixed and definite castes, but as priests usually are, politicians, citizens, men like their fellows; nor, as with the Christians, was the separation of religious persons driven to the extreme of monastic rule. In ordinary civic life in Greece, no one could prosper or maintain his position who held peculiar principles, or even secrets, and differed in outward modes of life and clothing;