Ovid’s Pythagoras

More Than Just Triangles

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Most of us when we think of Pythagoras, we remember what we learned in maths about Pythagoras’ Theorem, or at the very least, we remember that he had something to do with triangles. And he was a real person, born in Greece in approximately 570 BCE and dying in Italy in approximately 500 BCE). He was a scholar and philosopher who even had his own ‘Pythagorean Brotherhood’ (which, yes, was basically a religious cult devoted to mathematics and mysticism). In fact, the Pythagorean theorem was most likely discovered/invented by one of his disciples many years after his death — so it turns out that, for most people, the one thing for which they know Pythagoras is not even true.

So where does Ovid come into this? Well, they never met. There is a bigger gap in history between Ovid and Pythagoras than there is between Shakespeare and me. But Pythagoras is featured in Ovid’s epic poem the Metamorphoses (he is, in fact, one of the only real people to appear in it, along with Julius Caesar).

You see, whilst ostensibly a poem about mythology, it was described by Ovid himself as a poem of history, spanning from the beginning of time to the present day (that is, first century Rome). And as the poem reaches its final book, it begins to explore the lives of real people from history, trading the stories of gods and demigods for…