A dog severely beaten, he did pity him,
And spoke as follows to the man who beat him:
"Stop now, and beat him not; since in his body,
Abides the soul of a dear friend of mine,
Whose voice I recognized, as he was crying."
That Pythagoras, himself, did not believe in transmigration after such fashion, is shown quite plainly by the following statements of Hierocles, the Neo-Platonist in his commentary upon the Golden Verses of Pythagoras:
If through a shameful ignorance of the immortality of the human soul, a man should persuade himself that his soul dies with his body, he expects what can never happen; in like manner he who expects that after death he shall put on the body of a beast and become an irrational animal because of his vices, or a plant because of his dulness and stupidity—such a man, I say, acting quite contrary to those who transform the essence of man into one of the superior beings, is infinitely deceived and absolutely ignorant of the essential form of the soul, which can never change; for being and continuing always man, it is only said to become God or beast by virtue or vice, though it cannot be either the one or the other.
The following quotations give us true representations of Pythagoras' ideas on pre-existence and rebirth.
Souls cannot die. They leave a former home,
And in new bodies dwell and from them roam.