Metamorphoses, Book 15

Book 15 is the last book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the fifteen-book hexameter poem of transformations he had completed by AD 8, the year of his exile. It brings the story from the early kings of Rome down to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus, and ends with Ovid's own claim to immortality.

Numa, Romulus' successor, travels to Croton, whose founding is told, and there learns the teaching of the philosopher Pythagoras. Pythagoras' long speech is the centrepiece of the book: he condemns the eating of animal flesh, argues that souls pass from body to body, and illustrates the principle that everything changes and nothing perishes with examples from the ages of man, the elements, rivers and seas, Etna, strange births and the phoenix. After Numa's death his wife Egeria weeps herself into a spring, and Hippolytus, who has become the Italian god Virbius, tells his story to comfort her. There follow the Etruscan seer Tages, Romulus' spear that became a tree, and the Roman Cipus, who went into exile rather than become king when horns grew on his head. In 293 BC the Romans bring the healing god Aesculapius from Epidaurus, and he sails to Rome as a serpent. The book closes with Caesar's murder and transformation into a star, praise of Augustus, and Ovid's epilogue.

Pythagoras' speech offers a philosophical key to the whole poem, and the epilogue, ending 'vivam', 'I shall live', is one of the most famous in Latin. The Latin is clear, though the philosophy requires attention.