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Notes -
Wow, 3-to-1 odds and they not only lost, their entire city was destroyed. Those Krotoniates must have been good fighters. Although maybe the 'exiling wealthy citizens and confiscating their wealth' bit didn't help, since generally speaking those wealthy citizens are the very ones you want to call up during wartime.
"We attacked them with triple their numbers and not only did we fail to take their city, but they turned around and destroyed ours," certainly sounds like the outcome a of bunch of ignorant peasants picking a fight they can't win against much wealthier (and better equipped) Greek citizen-infantry. If the Krotoniates were wealthy Phalangite soldiers like Socrates, armed with pikes and heavy armor, and the Sybarites were literally anything else, the I can completely see an army of 100,000 marching through an army of 300,000 and deciding it was so easy they might as well keep going and sack the enemy city.
...although I will say that I am deeply skeptical of these numbers. There are Roman civil wars that involved fewer than 400,000 soldiers, and this was a local fight between city-states. I'm assuming that the ancient historians added a zero or two (as they so often did) and the real numbers were a lot closer to 10,000 vs 30,000, or even 1,000 vs 3,000.
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