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... tendere longe exspatiemur equis, caelum et quodcumque sub illo...


'caelum et quodcumque sub illo est / inmutat formas' - (: heaven and what is beneath it, changes its forms) an interesting statement, if you compare this with the first words of the Metamorphosis, in which Ovid defines, what a Metamorphoses is: '- in corpora nova - formas - mutatas - '; that makes me think, that Ovid didnot only consider the funny, mythical stories, metamorphoses, but also other phenomena, to which he refers in this section, this discourse of Pythagoras; such as, the birth of a child, the growth of Rome, the different stages of the life we live, the life of frogs, bees, insects, etc; in all these phenomena Ovid discerned metamorphoses, whereas the bulk of this book is dedicated to the metamorphoses in the funny, mythical stories.

An interesting aspect of this all (remark below), is, that according to Pythagoras the changes or - one step further - the metamorphoses are a reason for vegetarism, for to not eat meat. Now who is speaking here in this section actually? Pythagoras of Ovid himself? Is Ovid using Pythagoras to state vegetarism as an absolute moral necessity(?) I envisage Ovid living his life and suddenly it dawns to him: 'So many things in life are metamorphoses. What? Everything, the whole of life is a metamorphoses!'- And successively Ovid starts to write a book with the metamorphoses as the basic theme. There are 2 more aspects to this: 1)Ovid has to write in such a way, that it entertains; hence, he chooses the funny, mythical stories, which were by the way commonplace in daily, roman life. 2) And Ovid is a vegetarian and he uses the theme of the metamorphoses to give vegetarism a fundament to rest upon, a reason to be nothing but a vegetarian: if metamorphoses is indeed a reality, then we must all be vegetarians!


 
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