ABSTRACT
After the School of Miletos, the first fact which the historian of Greek thought encounters is the appearance of the Pythagorean school. By its founder, this new philosophy was Ionian, but it took shape and developed in the part of Southern Italy which the Romans called Great Greece, where Greek colonists had settled about the beginning of the Vllth century, Achaeans, Messenians, Locrians, and others. It was a comparatively new environment, less subject to tradition and therefore more plastic, intelligent, and passionate, in which culture seems to have followed the advance of material prosperity. At Croton, for example, the cradle of Pythagoreanism, there had long been a celebrated school of medicine.
