to
have received it from the Egyptians, by whose priesthood there is
little doubt that it was generally promulgated. Some writers have
suggested that this transmigration was only taught by Pythagoras in
a metaphorical sense; as, for instance, when he said that the souls
of men were transferred to beasts, it was only to teach us that
irregular passions render us brutes; on examination, however, we
shall find that there is no ground to doubt that he intended his
doctrines to be understood according to the literal meaning of his
words; indeed, the more strongly to enforce his doctrine by a
personal illustration, he was in the habit of promulgating that he
remembered to have been Euphorbus, at the time of the siege of Troy,
and that his soul, after several other transmigrations, had at last
entered the body which it then inhabited, under the name of
Pythagoras. In consequence of this doctrine, it was a favourite
tenet of his followers to abstain from eating the flesh of animals,
for fear of unconsciously devouring some friend or kinsman.

The second feature of this philosophy consisted in the elucidation
of the changes that happen in the physical world, a long series of
which is here set forth by the Poet; truth being mingled at random
with fiction. While some of his facts are based upon truth, others
seem to have only emanated from the fertile invention of the
travellers of those days; of the latter kind are the stories of the
river of Thrace, whose waters petrified those who drank of it; the
fountains that kindled wood, that caused a change of sex, that
created an aversion to wine, that transformed men into birds, and
fables of a similar nature; such, too, are those stories which were
generally believed by even the educated men of antiquity, but which
the wisdom of modern times has long since shown to be utterly
baseless, as, for instance, that bees grew from the entrails of the
ox, and hornets from those of the horse. The principle of
Pythagoras, that everything is continually changing and that nothing
perishes, is true to a certain extent; but in his times, and even in
those of Ovid, philosophy was not sufficiently advanced to speak
with precision on the subject, and to discover the true boundary
between truth and fiction.

FABLES IV. V. AND VI. [XV.479-621]

Egeria, the wife of Numa, is inconsolable after his death, and is
changed into a fo