Metamorphoses: Book 15: Pythagoras Summary & Analysis

Pythagoras was born on an island ruled by tyrants and fled to Croton. He likes to contemplate nature’s laws, the creation of the universe, and the gods. He shares his contemplations with the people of Croton. One day, he gives a speech urging them not to eat meat. He addresses the citizens as mortals and implores them not to defile their bodies with meat when nature provides an abundance of fruit, milk, and honey. Pythagoras points out that only savage beasts eat meat, and that it is wrong for one creature to eat the guts of another. He says that greed and gluttony cause people to eat meat.

Pythagoras points out that, during the Golden Age, humans never ate meat. During that time, birds, rabbits, and fish lived without fear of human killers. A person can kill an animal out of self-defense, but they shouldn’t eat it. People started to eat their foes, but then they started to eat their pigs, goats, and oxen—animals which provide wonderful services, such as milk and labor, to humans while they’re alive. Even worse, humans started including the gods in their murders, believing that sacrificing animals pleased them. Pythagoras says it is horrible to kill an innocent animal and then to gorge on its flesh.

After this speech, Pythagoras says he will unveil the heavens, expose the errors of mortals, and correct them by revealing fate. Pythagoras wonders why human beings fear death and says that all things change but that nothing dies. After the body has decayed and burned, the soul wanders and enters new bodies. Like in a piece of wax, each form that the soul inhabits is only an impression on the unchanging wax. Therefore, a person should never live according to their bodily desires.

Pythagoras says that nothing in the universe remains unchanged. Like a river that can never stand still, time is constantly flowing. Night and day are different; the sun is different colors at different times, and the moon a different size and shape at different times. The year has four seasons, starting with youthful spring and ending with aged winter.

The human body is also constantly changing and aging. A person begins as a seed until nature confines them inside a mother’s womb and thrusts them into the light. Humans are born helpless until they gradually develop into self-supporting creatures. Their strength increases until their prime and then they start to diminish. In this way, time causes everything to decay. Even the elements are impermanent, with earth, water, air and fire always evaporating and condensing into one another. Nothing keeps its original form, but nothing dies, either. Things simply change form, the whole remaining constant.

Pythagoras says that he has seen evidence that places also change. He has seen land erode into water and has found shells far away from the seashore. Plains have become valleys and marshes have become dry land. Rivers that were once safe to drink are now contaminated; some are drinkable at their source but not farther down. Islands have become mainland and mainland has become islands; old cities exist under the sea; winds have become trapped in caves and formed hills.

Pythagoras says that water both affects and undergoes change. A certain spring is hot and cold at different times of day; a certain river turns whatever it touches to marble; a certain pool emasculates whoever swims in it, and another makes the bather go mad; there is a spring that causes anyone who drinks from it to detest wine, and another that makes the drinker drunk as if on wine.

Pythagoras says that volcanoes are evidence of change. Volcanoes might suggest that a living creature lurks in the earth’s core, breathing flame through several holes in the earth’s surface. On the other hand, volcanoes might be due to winds trapped in the earth’s craters generating friction against the rock and starting fires. Or yet again, volcanoes may be a chemical reaction of minerals. When the creature moves, or the winds or minerals run out, the volcanoes change location or stop altogether.

Pythagoras says time and decay turn material into animals. If a person digs a ditch and buries a dead bull, bees are born all over the decaying carcass. Leaves will house the cocoons that later become butterflies, and mud births the tadpoles that turn into frogs. When a bear gives birth, it gives birth to a living lump of flesh that slowly grows and forms itself into a full-sized bear. Most animals start as limbless bodies that develop with time, and all birds come from the yolk of an egg. Only the phoenix is not born from an alien form: the baby phoenix is born from its father’s dead body and lives 500 years.

Pythagoras says that there is not enough time in the day for him to recount all the transformations of the universe. He says that civilizations also rise and fall. Troy was wealthy and populated, but now is humbled and reduced to ancient ruins. Sparta and Athens are gone. Now, Rome is rising, changing its shape, and steadily growing. When Troy was falling, Priam foreshadowed that it wouldn’t fall completely, but that it would live on in Aeneas, who would forge it anew on a strange land. Rome started in this way, and Iulus will go on to make it powerful before he is taken up to the heavens as a god. In this way, the Greeks won the Trojan War for the benefit of the Trojans.

Pythagoras stops himself from straying too far off topic. He says that everything in the universe changes shape, including humans. Humans possess “winged souls” that inhabit different forms. For this reason, the animals a person encounters may be their parents or siblings. Therefore, people should respect animals and not eat them. When a person kills an animal, they are spilling human blood. Pythagoras says people should let goats produce milk and sheep produce wool and stop murdering them. Since all creatures are one, Pythagoras recommends a diet that is kind to all.