The following passage from the fifteenth book of the _Metamorphoses_ has been justly said by Dryden, his translator, to be the finest part of the whole poem. It is almost impossible to believe but that, in spite of his misspent life, he must have felt, in his better moments at least, something of the truth and beauty of the Pythagorean principles which he so exquisitely versifies. In the touching words which he puts into the mouth of the jealous Medea--the murderess of her children--he might have exclaimed in his own case-- “Video meliora proboque Deteriora sequor.”[24] “He [Pythagoras], too, was the first to forbid animals to be served up at the table, and he was first to open his lips, indeed full of wisdom yet all unheeded, in the following words: ‘Forbear, O mortals! to pollute your bodies with such abominable food. There are the _farinacea_ (_fruges_), there are the fruits which bear down the branches with their weight, and there are the grapes swelling on the vines; there are the sweet herbs; there are those that may be softened by the flame and become tender. Nor is the milky juice denied you; nor honey, redolent of the flower of thyme. The lavish Earth heaps up her riches and her gentle foods, and offers you dainties without blood and without slaughter. The lower animals satisfy their ravenous hunger with flesh. And yet not all of them; for the horse, the sheep, the cows and oxen subsist on grass; while those whose disposition is cruel and fierce, the tigers of Armenia and the raging lions, and the wolves and bears, revel in their bloody diet. “‘Alas! what a monstrous crime it is (_scelus_) that entrails should be entombed in entrails; that one ravening body should grow fat on others which it crams into it; that one living creature should live by the death of another living creature! Amid so great an abundance which the Earth--that best of mothers--produces does, indeed, nothing delight you but to gnaw with savage teeth the sad produce of the wounds you inflict and to imitate the habits of the Cyclops? Can you not appease the hunger of a voracious and ill-regulated stomach unless you first destroy another being? Yet that age of old, to which we have given the name of _golden_, was blest in the produce of the trees and in the herbs which the earth brings forth, and the human mouth was not polluted with blood.