Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
But you ask me by what reasoning Pythagoras abstained from eating flesh? 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 — set out tables of dead and stale bodies, and called them delicacies and luxuries, when the very parts that a little before were bellowing and speaking and moving and seeing —
how did his sight endure the slaughter, when they were being cut open, flayed, torn limb from limb? How did his sense of smell bear the stench? How did his taste not turn away in disgust at handling the pollution of other creatures' sores and deadly wounds, and taking in their juices and discharges? "The hides crawled, and the meat, both roasted and raw, bellowed on the spits, and gave out a voice like that of cattle" — this is invention and fable;
but the dinner itself was truly monstrous: to devour something that was still, so to speak, lowing, and to instruct oneself in what living, still-speaking creatures one ought to be nourished from, prescribing certain seasonings and roastings and side-dishes. One ought to look for the man who first began this, not the one who only recently gave it up; or one might say that for those very first men who attempted to eat flesh, the whole cause was simply their want of resources —
for they did not come to this through consorting with lawless appetites, nor through wantoning into pleasures contrary to nature out of some abundance of necessities. No — they would say, if they could receive perception and voice for the moment: "O blessed and beloved-of-the-gods are you who now exist, allotted such an age of life, enjoying and possessing an ungrudging inheritance of good things — all that grows for you, all that you may harvest, what wealth from the
fields, what pleasures it is possible to pluck from the plants! You may even live luxuriously without being defiled. But we were received by the gloomiest and most fearsome portion of life and time, cast down by our first origin into a helpless and boundless want. As yet the air still hid the sky, and the stars were confused with turbid and scarcely distinguishable moisture and fire and gusts of wind; not yet had the sun taken up a fixed
and steady course that marked out dawn and setting, nor did it lead the seasons back around again, crowned with fruit-bearing wreaths of blossom. The earth was ravaged by the disordered outpourings of rivers, and much of it was rendered savage and shapeless by marshes and deep mud and barren thickets and forests; there was as yet no instrument for the bearing of cultivated fruits, nor any device of skill; and famine gave no time, nor
did the yearly seasons wait for a sowing that did not yet exist. What wonder, then, if we made use of the flesh of animals contrary to nature, when mud was being eaten and the bark of trees was being devoured, and it was good fortune merely to find a sprouting couch-grass or some root of reed? When they tasted and ate of the acorn, they danced for joy around some oak or holm-oak, calling it life-giving and mother and nurse: that
was the festival the life of that time knew, while everything else was full of oppression and gloom. But as for you now living — what madness, what frenzy, drives you to bloodshed, when you have such abundance of necessities? Why do you slander the earth as though it were unable to nourish you? Why do you commit impiety against law-giving Demeter, and put to shame the gentle and gracious Dionysus of the vine, as though what comes from
them were not sufficient for you? Are you not ashamed to mix the gentle fruits with blood and slaughter? Yet you call serpents and leopards and lions savage, while you yourselves commit bloodshed, leaving nothing of savagery to them — for to them, killing is nourishment, but for you it is a mere relish. For surely it is not lions and wolves that we eat in self-defense; rather, we let those be, and instead seize and kill the harmless and tame
creatures, without stings or claws or teeth sharp enough to bite, which nature seems to have brought forth for the sake of beauty and grace as well. It is as if someone, seeing the Nile in flood and filling the land with its life-giving and fruit-bearing stream, did not marvel at this in what it carries — the planting and fruit-bearing of the tamest and most useful crops — but instead, having seen somewhere
a crocodile swimming or an asp dragging itself along, or mice — wild and foul creatures — should cite these as the causes of his complaint and as proof of the necessity of the thing; or as if someone, looking at this earth and this ploughland filled with cultivated crops and heavy with ears of grain, should then peer among these crops and, spotting somewhere a stalk of darnel or some blighted ear, should then abandon the rest —
and, instead of harvesting and enjoying them, complain about these alone. Something of the same kind happens when one watches a speech of an orator overflowing and carried along in some lawsuit or defense, coming to the aid of men in danger, or indeed in refutation and accusation of wrongdoing, with proofs — flowing and being carried along not simply nor plainly, but together with many, indeed all sorts of, emotional appeals, into souls likewise many and varied and different —
among the listeners or the judges, souls which the speech must turn and change, or indeed soothe and tame and settle; and then, instead of watching and measuring this — the guiding purpose and the real contest of the matter — one instead picks out incidental phrases which the speech, in its downward course, swept along with the rush of its movement, phrases that fell out and slipped along together with the rest of the speech. And so too with some popular orator one may watch this. But nothing about us
abashes us — not the flower-bright form of the coloring, not the persuasiveness of the melodious voice, not the cunning of the soul, not the cleanliness in habits and the refinement in understanding of these wretched creatures — no, for the sake of a little scrap of flesh we take away from a soul the sun, the light, the span of life for which it was born and made to live. And then the sounds it utters and prolongs we suppose to be inarticulate noise, not entreaties and supplications and pleas of justice,
each one saying, as it were, "I do not beg off from your need, but from your wanton insult; kill me in order to eat, but do not kill me merely so that you may eat with more pleasure." O the cruelty! It is a dreadful thing indeed to see the table of rich men being laid, with its corpse-adorning cooks and caterers, but more dreadful still to see it being carried away — for what is left over is more than what has been eaten. So these creatures died for nothing! Yet other men, sparing what has
been set before them, will not allow it to be cut or carved up further, declining the dead flesh — though they did not spare it while it lived. For we say it is unreasonable for those men to claim that nature is the origin and authority for this practice; for that eating flesh is not in accordance with human nature is shown, first of all, from the very construction of our bodies. 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. Rather, nature itself, by the smoothness of our teeth and the smallness of our mouth and the softness of our tongue and the bluntness of our digestive capacity for processing, disowns carnivorous eating from the outset. If you claim that you were born by nature for
such a diet, then first kill, yourself, whatever you wish to eat — do it yourself, by your own hand, without using a cleaver or any club or axe. Rather, as wolves and bears and lions themselves kill whatever they eat, so you: fell an ox with your teeth, or a pig with your mouth; tear apart a lamb or a hare and eat it, falling upon it while it is still alive, as those animals do. But if you wait for what you are about to eat to become a corpse,
and if the living soul present in it, once it perceives what is happening, makes you ashamed to enjoy the flesh, why do you eat what is animate, against nature? And yet no one would even eat it lifeless and as a mere corpse just as it is — instead you boil it, roast it, transform it through fire and drugs, altering and converting and quenching the act of slaughter with a thousand seasonings, so that the sense of taste, thus deceived, may accept what is alien to it. And yet there is a charming story of the Spartan who,
having bought a little fish at an inn, handed it to the innkeeper to prepare; and when the innkeeper asked for cheese and vinegar and oil, he said, "If I had had these, I would not have bought a fish." But we, by contrast, indulge ourselves so far in this bloody business that we call the flesh a "relish," and then, in turn, we need relishes for the meat itself, mixing in oil, wine, honey, fish-sauce, and truly seasoning it with Syrian and Arabian spices, as though we were
embalming a corpse with vinegar. And indeed, once the flesh has been thus broken down and softened and, in a manner of speaking, half-decayed, it is hard work to master the digestion of it, and once mastered it produces terrible heaviness and sickly indigestions. Diogenes dared to eat an octopus raw, in order to do away with the cooking of meats by fire; and with many people standing around him, he wrapped himself in his cloak and, bringing
the flesh to his mouth, said, "It is on your behalf that I run this risk and face this danger." A fine danger indeed, by Zeus! For it was not, like Pelopidas facing danger for the freedom of Thebes, or like Harmodius and Aristogeiton for that of the Athenians, that the philosopher took the risk beforehand, wrestling with a raw octopus — was it to make life itself more bestial? It is not only the eating of flesh, then, that works against nature upon our bodies; it also makes our souls
coarse through satiety and excess: "For wine and gorging on flesh make the body strong and robust, but the soul weak," as the saying goes. And so as not to offend the athletes, let me use examples closer to home: for the Athenians call us Boeotians thick, insensible, and stupid, chiefly on account of our gluttony — "these men, in turn," as Menander says, "who have jaws,
" and as Pindar says, "to understand thereafter..." — "a dry radiance is the wisest soul," according to Heraclitus. Empty jars, when struck, resound; but once filled, they no longer answer to the blows. Of bronze vessels, the thin ones send their ringing sound out in every direction, until someone stops it and deadens it by grasping with the hand the vibration as it travels round; the eye, when filled to excess with moisture, grows dim and loses its keenness
for its proper function. When we behold the sun through moist air and a multitude of undigested vapors, we see it not clear and bright, but sunk in mist and murk, its rays slipping away from view. So too, through a body that is turbid and gorged and weighed down with foods alien to it, the brightness of the soul and its radiance must of necessity suffer dullness and confusion, and wander
and drift, having no clear vision or vigor toward the fine and hard-to-discern ends of things. Apart from all this, is it not a marvel in itself, this habituation toward kindness to humanity? For who would wrong a human being, so disposed as he is toward alien evils and creatures unrelated to him, gently and humanely? I recalled, in a discussion three days ago about Xenocrates, that the Athenians imposed a penalty on the man who had flayed a ram
while it was still alive; and, I think, the one who tortures a living creature is no worse than the one who takes away its life outright and kills it — but rather, it seems, we are more sensitive to what goes against custom than to what goes against nature. These things I was saying there in a more general way; but as for the great and mysterious doctrine, incredible to cowardly men and to those who think only mortal thoughts, as Plato says, that lies at the origin of the teaching — I hesitate
still to set it in motion with argument, just as a ship's captain hesitates in a storm, or a stage-machinist raises his device in the theater while the scenery is being wheeled about. Yet perhaps it is no worse to strike up a prelude and give voice beforehand to the words of Empedocles: for there 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. And indeed this doctrine appears to be older still: for the
myths told about Dionysus concerning his suffering of dismemberment, and the daring deeds of the Titans against him, and their punishment and blasting by thunderbolt after they tasted of the slaughter — all this is a myth riddling at rebirth. For that irrational and disorderly and violent element within us, the ancients named not divine but demonic, calling it the Titans — and this is the part that is being punished and is paying the penalty.