Tracing Changes in Pythagoras Speech in Ovids...

Tracing Changes in Pythagoras Speech in Ovids Metamorphoses Change in Ovid, as well as in life, seems to be the only constant. Change is the subject of the Metamorphoses and Ovids purpose in recounting myths is established from the very beginning: My intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms... with a poem that runs from the worlds beginning to our own days (1.1-4). From this foundation, Ovid launches into his stories, using metamorphosis more as a vehicle for telling his stories than as an actual subject matter. Although he retells religious myths, Ovid is not writing a religious manuscript. Rather, the product is a work of literature. Ovid is conscious that he is writing literature, not religion, and†¦show more content†¦By contrast, Ovids motives in narrating myths in the Metamorphoses are rarely ulterior. Most myths are free of the religious implications and the moralistic nuances that his Greek predecessors used as the backbone of their plays and poems. Instead, Ovid chooses to entertain his readership by his brilliant language and delight them with not only absorbing tales, but also with his masterful talent of weaving narratives together. Let us not be overzealous and label Ovid as an entertainer, for his themes and purpose change as quickly as the stories he narrates. Rather, it is safer to say that Ovid relieves his audience of any ulterior religious or moral meaning. Pythagoras, on the other hand, inveighs against his audience to refrain from meat eating, in some cases comparing them to cannibals like Thyestes and the Cyclops. Pythagoras neglects to give a reason for not eating meat, waiting almost a hundred lines to explain that the spirit comes and goes, is housed wherever it wills, shifts residence from beasts to men, from men to beasts (15.171-173). Our souls, Pythagoras claims, are deathless... when they leave our bodies, they find new dwelling-places (15.162-164). Pythagoras asserts that the spirit, or soul, is the same in men and animals since man can be reincarnated into beast and vice versa; therefore, eating an animal is equivalent to cannibalism. A contemporary of Pythagoras, Xenophanes, mocked this belief in the