Shifts focus to the most extensive and contentious passage of natural philosophy in the Ovidian corpus, the Speech of Pythagoras from book 15 of the Metamorphoses. Ovid’s representation of the transmigration of souls has a number of important precedents in Plato’s dialogues, including that from the end of the Timaeus. Recollection forms an important component of the theories of transmigration from the dialogues, with the soul’s access to wisdom being the result of its ability to remember the knowledge that it gained when travelling beyond its incarnate existence. For Ovid’s Pythagoras, however, there is no eternal world beyond that of embodied existence, with the ability to remember past lives being as much a form of intertextual recollection as a precise philosophical theory. The Speech of Pythagoras provides a further opportunity for Ovid to underscore the fluid ontologies of the Metamorphoses, while disturbing the notion of metamorphosis as a unifying principle for the text. The illusion of a regular cycle of transmigration governing the lives and afterlives of the soul is disrupted by the inability for such a cycle to ever be fully integrated with the accounts of metamorphoses that precede it.