Ovid on Pythagoras' Teachings and Higher Ethics

Ovid · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 14 pages

Ovid's account of Pythagoras, taken from the Metamorphoses in A.S. Kline's translation and broken into eleven short sections so that each topic can be found on its own: vegetarianism, metempsychosis, the eternal flux, the four ages of man, the elements, geological changes, physical changes, autogenesis, the phoenix, transfers of power, and the sanctity of life.

The portrait Ovid gives is of a man who had fled Samos and its rulers and was living in voluntary exile, hating their tyranny; though the gods were far away he visited their region of the sky in his mind, and what nature denied to human vision he enjoyed with his inner eye. Having considered every subject through concentrated thought, he communicated it widely in public, teaching silent crowds who listened in wonder. The sections that follow are the substance of that teaching as Ovid reports it, and the file makes a natural companion to the two Iamblichus extracts also in this section.

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