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Dr. Charlotte Krause : Her Life & Literature
and Lord Buddha. The far-off Occident also could boast of a powerful preacher of vegetarianism in those remote days, although it must be admitted that his practical influence did not outlive his fame. This preacher of vegetarianism was none else but the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. History supposes him to have been born about 590 B.C. on the island of Samos in the Ionian Sea, to have undertaken vast travels all over the Old World, and finally to have settled down at Crotona, in South Italy, where King Numa Pompilius became his admirer and disciple.
An account of Pythagoras and his teachings is given in the “Metamorphoses' of the Latin poet Ovid, who died A.D. 18 in exile, somewhere on the shores of the Black Sea, far off from the refined civilization of his beloved Rome.
Ovid's art is famous for its elegance, its gracefulness and gaiety. Some of his works, such as the 'Ars Amandi' ( the Latin Kāma-Šāstra'), are even frivolous, if not lascivious, and made his own by no means prudish contemporaries fell scandalized.
These stanzas of the 'Metamorphoses' however which contain Ovid's account of Pythagoras, seem to reveal quite a new and a serious face of the dallying poet. They are permeated by a wonderfully sincere tone of sympathy with the ‘Samian Sage' and of partisanship with his doctrine of self-denying compassion. They make the reader feel as if he were listening not to the notorious author of the 'Ars Amandi' but to a most rigorous moral preacher, who does not lack a dose of pastoral pathos either.
Fascination as Ovid's account of Pythagoras may thus be from the literary standpoint, it is not without interest for the historian too, to whose knowledge it may be said to add some new details.
These considerations may justify the full account being rendered here in literal translation. It has the form of a sermon delivered by Pythagoras before King Numa Pompilius, and runs as follows ( Metamorphoses, Liber XV, stanzas 6-178 ):
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