Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
Appeals to outside courts and the practice of importing foreign judges were devised by the Greeks in the first place out of distrust of one another, as though justice, like some other necessity, did not grow among them and so had to be sought elsewhere. Is it not the same, then, with philosophers, who because of their disagreements with one another summon some of their problems before the nature of irrational animals, as though before a foreign city, and entrust the verdict to the passions and characters of those creatures, on the ground that they cannot be approached and cannot be bribed? Or is this too a common charge against human wickedness, that on the most necessary and greatest questions, being ourselves in doubt, we go looking among horses and dogs and birds to learn how we ourselves ought to marry and beget and rear children — as if there were no sign of nature within us, and we had to call in the characters and passions of beasts as witnesses
and accusers of our own great departure from and transgression of what is natural, since right from the beginning, at the very first steps, we become confused and disordered. For in those animals nature keeps what is her own unmixed, unadulterated, and simple; but in human beings, under the influence of reason and custom, she has suffered what oil suffers at the hands of perfumers — mixed with many added opinions and judgments,
she has become varied and artificial, and has not preserved what is properly her own. And let us not be surprised if the irrational animals follow nature more closely than rational beings do; for even plants follow her more closely than animals do, since to plants nature gave neither imagination nor impulse to unsettle them with desire for anything beyond what is natural, but, bound as it were in fetters, they remain confined and mastered, always traveling the single course along which nature
leads them as they go. As for wild beasts, they do not possess reason's gentleness, its refinement, or its excessive love of freedom, but having only irrational impulses and appetites, and given to wanderings and roamings, they nonetheless seldom drift far, but ride, so to speak, at anchor to nature; just as a horse walking along a road under rein and bridle can be shown to keep a straight path. But in man the master and
self-ruling faculty, reason, discovering ever new deviations and innovations, has left no clear or distinct trace of nature at all. Observe how much that is natural there is among animals with regard to marriage. In the first place, they do not wait for laws against celibacy or late marriage, as the citizens of Lycurgus and Solon do, nor do they fear the penalties attached to childlessness, nor do they chase after the honors given to fathers of three children, as many Romans marry and beget children
not so that they may have heirs, but so that they may be able to inherit. Next, the male does not mate with the female at all times, for pleasure is not the end they seek, but generation and offspring. For this reason, in the season of the year that has fertile breezes and a temperature suited to those about to give birth, the female, tame and desired, comes together with the male, delighting in the sweet scent of her own skin and her own
adornment of body, full of dew and pure grass; and when she perceives that she is pregnant and has conceived, she withdraws decorously and takes thought for the pregnancy and the safety of what will be born. It is not possible to describe worthily what is done, except to say that each of these acts occurs amid affection, forethought, endurance, and self-control. Yet we call the bee wise and think of her as scheming for golden
honey, flattering her for the sweetness that delights and tickles us, while we overlook the wisdom and skill of other creatures in giving birth and rearing their young. Take the halcyon, for instance: while still pregnant she builds her nest, gathering the spines of the sea-needle fish and weaving and threading them through one another, working the shape into something rounded like a fisherman's creel and elongated;
and by the fitting and closeness of the weave, having packed the spines tightly together, she sets it precisely beneath the wash of the wave, so that, being gently struck and compacted, the felted surface becomes watertight; indeed it becomes hard to split even with iron and stone. And what is still more astonishing, the mouth of the nest is shaped so exactly to the size and measure of the halcyon that no other creature, whether
larger or smaller, can enter it, and, as they say, not even the sea itself is admitted, not even the smallest amount of it. The dogfish, above all, bear their young alive within themselves, then let them go out and graze outside, and afterward take them back again and enfold them, letting them sleep within their own entrails. The bear, the most savage and grim of beasts, gives birth to shapeless and unformed young, and by shaping the membranes with her tongue as with a tool
she seems not merely to bear her offspring but actually to fashion it. And the lion of Homer, which, as it leads its cubs, is met in the woods by hunters, and glories in its strength, and draws its whole brow down, veiling its eyes — is it not likewise minded to come to terms with the hunters concerning its young? For, in general, affection for offspring
makes cowardly creatures bold, makes the lazy industrious, and makes the gluttonous frugal, just as Homer's bird, bringing food to her nestlings whenever she catches it, though it goes ill with herself — for she feeds her young at the cost of her own hunger, and holds and presses down with her beak the food that reaches for her own stomach, lest she forget herself and swallow it. And as
a bitch standing over her tender puppies barks and is eager to fight a man she does not even recognize, having taken on, as it were, a second passion in her fear for her young — so partridges, when pursued along with their young, let the young fly off and escape, while they themselves contrive to draw the hunters' attention, rolling and tumbling nearby and letting themselves almost be caught; then they run out a little way, and again stand still and offer
themselves within reach of hope, until, by thus courting danger before their chicks, they have drawn the pursuers far off from the young ones' safety. As for hens, we have before our eyes every day the way they care for their chicks — loosening their wings so that some may creep in underneath, while others climb upon their backs and creep up from every side, being received with a certain glad and affectionate clucking; but dogs and even snakes, if they are afraid
for themselves, flee, while if they are afraid for their young, they defend them and fight beyond their strength. Are we then to think that nature has implanted these feelings in creatures such as these — providing for the offspring of hens and dogs and bears — but has failed to move and touch us with the reflection that these are examples for those who follow them, while for the unfeeling they remain reproaches for their want of feeling, by which they accuse human nature alone
of not having affection freely given, and of not knowing how to love without some need for it? For it is admired in the theaters, that line of the poet: for pay does one man love another, according to Epicurus — the father the son, the mother her child, children their parents. But if beasts were given the power of reason, and someone gathered horses and cattle and
dogs and birds into a common theater, would he not proclaim, rewriting the line, that dogs do not love their puppies for pay, nor horses their foals, nor birds their nestlings, but freely and by nature — and this, once recognized in the feelings of all creatures, would be acknowledged as well and truly said? For it is shameful, O Zeus, that the begetting, birth-pangs, labor, and rearing of young among beasts should be a matter of nature and of grace, while those of human beings should be loans and wages and
pledges given for the sake of advantage. But this account is neither true nor worth listening to. For nature, just as in wild plants — wild grapevines, wild figs, wild olives — has implanted the unripe and imperfect beginnings of cultivated fruits, so too she has given to irrational creatures an affection for their offspring that is incomplete and does not extend far enough to amount to justice, nor does it go beyond mere need. But man, a rational and
political animal, she has led on toward justice and law and the honoring of gods and the founding of cities and mutual goodwill, furnishing noble and beautiful and fruit-bearing seeds of these things in the very gratitude and love felt toward one's offspring, following the first principles that were laid down. And these first principles lay in the very structure of our bodies. For everywhere nature is exact and skillful and complete and leaves nothing
unfinished, having, as Erasistratus said, "nothing paltry about her"; but what concerns generation cannot be worthily described, nor perhaps is it fitting to touch too precisely, in words and terms, on things that should remain hidden; rather one should, from what is set aside and concealed, infer the natural fitness of those parts for begetting and giving birth. It is enough that the working and management of milk should reveal her forethought
and care. For whatever surplus of blood beyond what is needed accumulates in women, through the sluggishness and slightness of their vital spirit, wanders about and weighs them down; at other times it has become habituated, through nature's opening of channels and passages, to being discharged in monthly cycles, thereby lightening and cleansing the rest of the body, while providing the womb, like earth for plowing and sowing
among plants, ready and fertile at the proper season. But when the womb receives the seed that falls upon it and enfolds it as rooting takes place — "for the navel is first, in the womb," as Democritus says, "anchored against tossing and wandering, a mooring-rope and a tendril" — for the growing and future fruit; then nature closes off the monthly and purifying channels, and, taking hold of the blood that is carried along, uses it as nourishment
and irrigates the embryo, now taking shape and being formed, until, having grown within to its proper measure, it needs, once born, another kind of nurture and place. Then the blood, more skillfully than any farmer or irrigator diverting water from one use to another and redirecting it, has already prepared, as it were, underground springs or fountains of flowing liquid, received not idly or without feeling but
with the power, through the gentle warmth and soft femininity of breath, to concoct, refine, and transform it; for such is the inner disposition and blending that the breast possesses. And the flow of milk is not like streams or spouts released all at once, but ends in flesh that is porous, filtering it gently through fine channels, offering to the infant's mouth a store that is gentle and pleasant to touch and to embrace. But
all these instruments for generation, and such management, ambition, and forethought, would be of no use at all, had nature not also worked affection and solicitude into the mothers who bear. "Of all things that breathe and creep upon the earth" — this saying does not lie, when applied to an infant newly born. For nothing is so incomplete, so helpless,
so naked, so unformed, so unclean, as a human being seen at birth — to whom alone, virtually, nature has not granted even a clean passage into the light, but, smeared with blood and covered with gore, and looking more like one that has been slaughtered than one that has been born, there is nothing for anyone to touch, lift up, greet, and embrace except one who loves by nature. Therefore, whereas in other animals the
udders that give suck hang beneath the belly, in women they have come to be placed high, near the breast, within reach for kissing and embracing and drawing the infant close, since the end of bearing and nursing a child is not utility but affection. Carry the argument back to the earliest people, of whom some were the first to bear children, and others the first to see a newborn infant being born: for them there was no law
commanding the rearing of children, nor any expectation of gratitude or of repayment "lent out upon the young." I should rather say that the mothers would have had reason to be harsh and to bear a grudge against their infants, given how great the dangers and labors that came upon them: as when a sharp and bitter arrow strikes a woman in labor, the arrow that the Eileithyiai, the daughters of Hera, who bring on hard labor, send forth, bearing bitter birth-pangs. It is not, women say, that Homer
but Homer's own mother wrote this, out of having borne a child, or while still in labor, having in her own vitals that mixture of pain, at once bitter and sharp. But natural affection bent and led her on regardless: still hot and in pain and trembling from her labors, she did not pass over the infant or flee from it, but turned toward it, and smiled, and lifted it up, and embraced it, reaping from it nothing sweet or useful, but taking it up
laboriously and wretchedly, warming and cooling it amid the ruins of its swaddling clothes, and exchanging one labor by night for another by day. For what wages or advantages did the earliest mothers do this? Not even for those of today; for the hopes involved are uncertain and lie far in the future. A man who digs a vineyard at the spring equinox harvests it by autumn; he sows wheat when the Pleiades set and reaps it when they rise again; cattle and horses and birds bring forth their young ready for
use. But for a human being, the rearing is full of toil and the growth is slow, and since maturity in virtue lies far off, most fathers die before it comes. Neocles did not live to see the Salamis of his son Themistocles, nor did Miltiades live to see the Eurymedon of his son Cimon; Xanthippus never heard Pericles addressing the assembly, nor did Ariston hear Plato philosophizing, nor did the fathers of Euripides and Sophocles know their sons' victories — they listened to them lisping and spelling out syllables,
and they lived to see their revels and drinking-bouts and love affairs, the sort of transgressions the young commit; so that it is remembered and praised as the only notable thing Evenus ever wrote, among his inscriptions: "a child is, to his father, fear or grief for all time." And yet men do not stop rearing children — least of all those who have the least need of children. For it is ridiculous to suppose that the rich sacrifice and rejoice at having children born to them because
they will have people to support them and to bury them — unless, by Zeus, they raise children for want of heirs; for it is not possible to find or obtain, for one who wishes to take what belongs to others. Sand or dust or the feathers of birds of many songs could not be poured out in a number as great as that of the would-be heirs. Danaus, the father of fifty daughters, if he had been childless, would have had more heirs, and not the same kind of
heirs, either. For children feel no gratitude and do not court or honor their parents for this reason, since they regard the inheritance as a debt owed to them; whereas from strangers, around a childless man, you hear cries like those in comedies: "O Demos, first bathe, then decide the one case, put it in, sip it up, nibble a bit, here's your three obols." And what Euripides says, that money finds men friends and
has the greatest power among human affairs, is not simply true, but true of the childless: for these are the ones the rich invite to dinner, the ones rulers court, the ones orators alone plead for without a fee. A rich man with an unknown heir is powerful. Many, at any rate, who had many friends and were greatly honored, a single child, once born, made friendless and powerless. Hence nothing that is truly advantageous comes from children,
But the whole power of nature is present no less in human beings than in wild animals. For this instinct too, like many others, is dimmed by vice, just as a thicket springs up alongside and chokes cultivated seed. Or are we to say that a human being does not by nature love even himself, because many slaughter themselves or throw themselves from cliffs? Oedipus struck his eyes, and "the bloody pupils together drenched his beard." Hegesias, by his arguments, persuaded many of his listeners to starve themselves to death. "Many are the shapes of things divine..."
But these are, like those other cases, diseases and afflictions of the soul that drive a person out of his natural condition, as the sufferers themselves bear witness against themselves. For if a sow that has just farrowed loses a piglet, or a dog has a puppy torn to pieces, they become dejected and agitated, and offer sacrifices of aversion to the gods and regard it as a portent — which shows that it is natural for all creatures to love what is born to them and to rear it, not to destroy it.
Yet just as in mines the gold, though mixed with much earth and buried in it, still shines through, so nature, even amid these corrupted characters and passions, reveals its affection for offspring. For the poor do not raise children, fearing that, if raised worse than is fitting, they will become servile, uneducated, and lacking in every good thing; for since they consider poverty the worst of evils, they cannot bear to pass it on to their children, as though it were some grievous and serious disease.