IV. Pythagoras is mentioned by a Greek tradition

as one of the Greeks who visited India before the age of Alexander. It is almost certain that he went to Egypt and received there the doctrine of transmigra- tion which he taught in the Greek cities of lower Italy (b. c. 529). Jamblichus says : " He spent twelve years at Babylon, freely conversing with the Magi, was in- structed in everything venerable among them, and learned the most perfect worship of the gods." He is said to have represented the human soul as an emana- tion of the world soul, partaking of the divine nature. At death it leaves one body to take another and so goes through the circle of appointed forms. Ovid's " Metamorphoses " contains a long description of the Pythagorean idea, from which these verses are taken, as translated by Dry den : —
" Souls cannot die. They leave a former home,
And in new bodies dwell, and from them roam.
Nothing can perish, all things change below,
For spirits through all forms may come and go.
Good beasts shall rise to human forms, and men,
If bad, shall backward turn to beasts again.
Thus, through a thousand shapes, the soul shall go
And thus fulfill its destiny below."
But it is very difficult to determine exactly what the views of Pythagoras were. Aristotle, Plato, and
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Diogenes Laertius say lie taught that the soul when released by death must pass through a grand circle of living forms before reaching the human again. From Pythagoras himself we have only some aphorisms of practical wisdom and symbolic sentences ; from his disciples a few fragments — all devoid of the grotesque hypothesis generally ascribed to him. Although his name is synonymous with the transmigration of human souls through animal bodies, the strong probabilities are that if this doctrine came from him it was entirely exoteric, concealing the inner truth of reincarnation. Some of his later disciples, especially the author of the work which is attributed to Timseus the Locian, denied that he taught it in any literal sense, and said that by it he meant merely to emphasize the fact that men are assimilated in their vices to the beasts. (See