A powerful Greek city of southern Italy (Magna Graecia) where Pythagoras founded his secretive brotherhood, fusing mathematics, music, and the transmigration of souls into a single way of life.
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Croton (Magna Graecia) through the eras
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Archaic Age
An Achaean Greek colony on the toe of Italy, Croton was renowned for its athletes—its champion Milo won repeatedly at Olympia—and for the health of its citizens. Around 530 BCE the philosopher and sage Pythagoras arrived from his native Samos, fleeing the tyranny of Polycrates, and founded a brotherhood bound by strict discipline, a vegetarian rule, and the doctrine that the soul is immortal and passes through successive bodies. His followers held that number and harmony underlie all reality, and for a time they wielded great political influence over the city.
Classical Age
Croton reached its height around 510 BCE when it destroyed its rival Sybaris, but the Pythagorean order's grip on power provoked a violent backlash that scattered the brotherhood across southern Italy and Greece. Its mathematical and mystical teachings survived in figures like Philolaus of Croton, the first to set Pythagorean philosophy down in writing and to propose that the earth was not the center of the cosmos but moved around a central fire—an idea that would echo down to Copernicus.