Plutarch's essay arguing against eating meat, on grounds of anatomy, cruelty, the corruption of the soul, and a mystical Empedoclean doctrine of reincarnation.
De Esu Carnium ("On the Eating of Flesh") is a short essay from Plutarch's Moralia, framed as a response to someone asking why Pythagoras refused to eat meat. Rather than defending Pythagoras directly, Plutarch turns the question around: he wonders what kind of person could first have brought himself to eat the flesh of a slaughtered animal at all, and imagines the earliest humans excused only because famine and want left them no other food. Modern people, living amid abundance of grain and fruit, have no such excuse.
The essay argues on several fronts at once. Physiologically, Plutarch claims the human body -- with its blunt teeth, small mouth, and weak digestion -- was never built for carnivorous eating the way a wolf's or lion's was; if you want to eat meat by nature's terms, he says, you must be willing to kill and eat it raw, with your own teeth, as predators do. Morally, he dwells on the suffering of animals, citing an Athenian law that punished a man for flaying a ram alive, and insisting that cruelty in the taking of life is no better than the killing itself. Psychologically, he argues that heavy meat-eating clouds and coarsens the soul, using images of misted vision and muffled bronze bells to describe how gluttony dulls perception and moral sensitivity.
The essay closes by gesturing toward something deeper and more hesitant to state outright: a "great and mysterious doctrine" tied to Empedocles' teaching that souls, having sinned through murder and the eating of flesh, are bound into mortal bodies as punishment, and to Orphic myths of Dionysus torn apart by the Titans. Plutarch treats meat-eating not just as a dietary or ethical failing but as a symptom of the irrational, "Titanic" element in human nature -- the part that must be tamed if the soul is to be purified. The piece survives as one of antiquity's most developed vegetarian arguments, anticipating themes -- animal suffering, the naturalness of diet, the psychology of appetite -- that recur in later philosophical and religious writing.
“I, for my part, wonder rather by what feeling, or with what sort of soul or reason, the first human being touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a slaughtered animal”
— De Esu Carnium · read this chapter →
“The human body resembles none of those creatures born for carnivorous feeding: it has no hooked beak, no sharp claw, no roughness of tooth, no strength of stomach or heat of digestive spirit able to turn and process what is heavy and full of flesh.”
— De Esu Carnium · read this chapter →
“For wine and gorging on flesh make the body strong and robust, but the soul weak”
— De Esu Carnium · read this chapter →
“the Athenians imposed a penalty on the man who had flayed a ram while it was still alive”
— De Esu Carnium · read this chapter →
“he speaks allegorically of souls, saying that, paying the penalty for murders and the eating of flesh and mutual devouring, they are bound within mortal bodies”
— De Esu Carnium · read this chapter →
It is a short essay arguing against meat-eating, written in response to a question about why Pythagoras avoided flesh. Plutarch argues from human anatomy, animal suffering, and the corrupting effect of gluttony on the soul, closing with an Empedoclean doctrine that souls are punished for flesh-eating by being bound into mortal bodies.
Only the earliest humans get an excuse in his account -- he imagines them driven to it by an age of famine, mud, and bare survival before agriculture existed. He argues that people living amid grain, fruit, and other abundant foods, as his contemporaries did, have no such justification.
He points out that humans lack the hooked beaks, sharp claws, rough teeth, and powerful digestion of true carnivores, and challenges meat-eaters to kill and eat prey raw with their bare hands and teeth the way wolves and lions do, rather than relying on cutlery and cooking to disguise the act.
He is referring to Empedocles' teaching, read allegorically, that souls guilty of murder and the eating of flesh are bound into mortal bodies as punishment, connected to Orphic myths of the Titans tearing apart and devouring the infant Dionysus.
He cites it skeptically: Diogenes ate raw octopus publicly to shame people out of cooking meat, but Plutarch mocks the stunt as a trivial, self-serving 'danger' compared to real risks taken for the freedom of a city, questioning whether it actually made life more humane or just more brutish.
It opens as a reply to an unnamed questioner who had asked why Pythagoras abstained from meat, giving Plutarch an occasion to lay out his own extended case against flesh-eating rather than simply explaining Pythagorean practice.
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