Pythagoras believed that death does not end your existence. It only ends your current body. He teaches metempsychosis, the transmigration of the soul. A soul does not die with the body. After death, it can pass into another body, human or animal. That means the body is only a temporary form. What appears to be a different creature may contain the same soul that once inhabited another person. This is also why Pythagoras rejects killing animals for food. If a human soul can enter an animal, killing an animal could mean killing a being whose soul once belonged to a human. His famous principle is “omnia mutantur, nihil interit” - everything changes, nothing perishes. The body changes and eventually dies. The soul continues. For Pythagoras, death is therefore not the end of existence but a transition from one form to another. The Metamorphoses places this teaching at the end because it turns all the transformations before it into examples of the same idea. #Philosophy Image source:
“The xv. Booke of P. Oudious Naso, entyltuled Metamorphosis” (1567), Ovid, translated by Arthur Golding.
Source: Wikimedia Commons / Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image Version checked: 23 January 2011. License checked: 11 September 2026 - Public Domain / Public Domain Mark. „The School of Athens” (1509), Raphael. Source: Wikimedia Commons (original source: Web Gallery of Art). Version checked: 9 March 2011. License checked: 11 September 2026 - Public Domain (PD-Art / Public Domain Mark).