Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
Reason calls upon us to become, as it were, fresh recruits against our stale habit of eating flesh, both in our thoughts and in our zeal. For it is difficult, as Cato said, to speak to bellies that have no ears; and the potion of habit has already been drunk, like Circe's brew of "pangs and pains, deceits and wailings"; and it is not easy to pull out the hook of flesh-eating, fixed and driven deep as it is into our love of pleasure. Since it would have been well—just as the Egyptians, in preparing a corpse, remove the belly and, holding it up to the sun, cast it away as the cause of all the wrongs the man committed—so too we, cutting off from ourselves our own gluttony and blood-lust, might live the rest of our life in purity, since the belly itself is not blood-guilty, but is defiled by our lack of self-control.
Still, even if, by Zeus, it is impossible because of habit to be wholly free of wrongdoing, let us at least, ashamed of our wrongdoing, make use of reason: let us eat flesh, but because we are hungry, not out of luxury; let us kill an animal, but with pity and grief, not with insolence or torture—such as many now commonly inflict, some driving red-hot spits into pigs bound for slaughter, so that, through the quenching action of the iron, the blood, dispersing through the flesh, may soften and tenderize it; while others leap upon and trample the udders of sows heavy with young, so that, having stirred together blood and milk and the gore of embryos destroyed together in the pangs of birth—O Zeus the Purifier!—they may eat the most inflamed part of the animal. Others sew shut the eyes of cranes and swans and, shutting them up in darkness, fatten them, dressing their flesh with outlandish mixtures and elaborate sauces.
From this it is above all clear that it is not for nourishment, nor need, nor necessity, but out of surfeit and insolence and extravagance that men have made lawlessness into a pleasure. Then, just as erotic passion in women who know no limit of pleasure, testing everything, wandering, growing ever more unrestrained, falls away at last into things unspeakable—so too the excesses connected with eating, once they pass beyond what is natural and necessary, end by embellishing appetite with savagery and lawlessness.
For the senses fall sick together with one another, persuade one another, and grow unrestrained together, once they no longer master their natural measures. Thus hearing, once diseased, has corrupted music, from which what is enervated and dissolved now craves shameful caresses and womanish ticklings. The same corruption has taught the eye to take no delight in war-dances, nor in expressive gesture, nor in graceful dancing, nor in statues and paintings, but to make of the murder and death of men, of wounds and battles, its most extravagant spectacle.
Thus disorderly banquets are followed by unrestrained sexual unions, shameful acts of love by tasteless entertainments, licentious songs and hearings by degenerate theaters, and savage spectacles by insensibility toward human beings and by cruelty. For this reason the godlike Lycurgus, in his three rhetras, ordained that the doors of houses and their roof-beams be made with saw and axe alone, and that no other tool be brought to bear—not, surely, because he was waging war on gimlets and adzes and whatever tools are naturally suited to fine work, but because he knew that through such crude work you will not bring in a gilded couch, nor will you dare to bring into a plain house silver tables and purple carpets and costly stones; but upon such a house and couch and table and cup there follows a simple dinner and a plebeian breakfast—for, as an unweaned foal runs beside its mare, so all luxury and extravagance run together from the very beginning of a corrupt way of life.
What dinner, then, is not extravagant, into which nothing living is put to death? Do we reckon a soul a small expenditure? I do not yet speak of it as perhaps belonging to a mother or father or friend or child, as Empedocles said—but at least as a thing that shares in sensation, in sight, hearing, imagination, understanding, which each creature has received from nature for the acquiring of what is its own and the avoiding of what is alien to it.
Consider, then, which of the two better civilizes us—the philosophers who bid us eat our children and friends and fathers and wives once they are dead, or Pythagoras and Empedocles, who accustom us to be just even toward the other, non-human parts of creation. You laugh at the man who will not eat a sheep; but we, they will say, when we see someone cutting portions from his dead father or mother and sending some off to absent friends, and inviting those present and setting unstinting servings of flesh before them—shall we not laugh a little too?
But perhaps even now we are doing something wrong, whenever we touch these books, without first purifying our hands and eyes and feet and ears—unless, by Zeus, the purification for such matters is simply this: to discuss them while "washing the brine from our ears with a draught of fresh discourse," as Plato says.
But if one were to set the books beside each other, and the doctrines beside each other, the former would belong to the philosophy of Scythians and Sogdians and Melanchlaeni—peoples about whom even Herodotus, in reporting, is disbelieved—whereas the teachings of Pythagoras and Empedocles were once the laws of the ancient Greeks, and their diets that used no fire. As for the claim that we have no obligation of justice toward the irrational animals—who, then, were the ones who later came to know this? "They who first forged the wicked wayside knife, and first tasted of the plowing ox." In just this way tyrants, too, begin their rule with blood-guilt.
For just as the Athenians first put to death the vilest of their informers, the one nicknamed "the Expedient," and then a second in the same way, and a third—and thereafter, having grown accustomed to it, looked on unmoved while Niceratus the son of Nicias, and Theramenes the general, and Polemarchus the philosopher were destroyed—so too the first thing eaten was some wild and destructive animal; then some bird or fish was drawn in and tasted; and so, having been practiced and rehearsed upon these, the murderous impulse advanced to the plow-ox and the well-behaved sheep and the house-guarding cock, and, having thus by degrees whetted their insatiable appetite, men proceeded to the slaughter of human beings, and to wars, and to murders.
But unless one goes further and proves that souls, in their rebirths, make use of bodies in common, and that what is now rational becomes irrational again, and what is now savage becomes tame again—that nature changes and transplants everything, clothing it in an unfamiliar garment of flesh—even so, these facts do not turn people away from the licentiousness shown toward creatures once killed, the very licentiousness that produces diseases and heaviness in the body as well, and corrupts the soul as it turns toward war with ever more lawless passions, whenever we grow accustomed not to entertain a guest, nor to celebrate a marriage, nor to meet with friends, except with blood and murder.
And yet, even if what is said about the transmigration of souls into bodies is not worthy of belief as demonstrated, still the very uncertainty of the matter deserves great caution and fear. It is as if, in a night battle between armies, a man attacking with his sword a fallen soldier whose body is hidden beneath his armor should hear someone say that he does not know for certain, but thinks and suspects that the man lying there is his own son, or brother, or father, or tent-companion—would it not be better, giving weight to an unfounded suspicion, to let an enemy go as though he were a friend, than, disregarding the uncertainty, to kill a kinsman as though he were an enemy?
That, you will all say, would be a terrible thing. Consider too the Merope of tragedy, raising an axe against her own son, taking him for the murderer of her son, and saying, "A dearer-bought blow than this I give you." What commotion this stirs in the theater, the audience rising up together in fear, dreading lest she strike before the old man restraining her can stop her, and wound the young man! And if one old man stood by saying, "Strike, he is an enemy," and another, "Do not strike, he is your son"—which would be the greater wrong: to let an enemy escape punishment for the sake of a supposed son, or to fall into the murder of one's own child through anger at an enemy?
Since, then, it is neither hatred nor anger that leads us to this slaughter, nor any act of self-defense or fear on our own behalf, but the victim stands there for the sake of pleasure alone, its neck bent back and exposed beneath the knife—then one philosopher says, "Cut it down, the creature is irrational," while another says, "Hold back—what if the soul of a kinsman, or of some god, has come to dwell there?" Is the risk not equal and alike, O gods, whether I refuse to eat meat, or refuse to believe that I might be killing a child or some other kinsman? And yet this contest, too, is not an equal one for the Stoics, on behalf of flesh-eating.
For what is all this great exertion directed toward—the belly and the kitchens? Why, after so effeminizing and denouncing pleasure as neither a good, nor something to be pursued first, nor proper to us, have they concerned themselves so seriously with matters of pleasure? And surely it would have been consistent for them, if they banish perfume and pastry from their banquets, to be still more offended by blood and flesh. As it is, though, just as people who philosophize only about their daily accounts cut expense from their dinners solely in what is useless and superfluous, while not renouncing what is savage and murderous in their extravagance.
"Yes," one says, "for we have no obligation of justice toward irrational creatures." Nor, one might reply, toward perfume, nor toward foreign spices either—yet you turn away from these too, driving out from every side whatever is not useful or necessary, for the sake of pleasure. Well then, let us examine this point as well—that we have no obligation of justice toward animals—not with technical skill nor with sophistry, but by looking into our own feelings, and speaking to and questioning ourselves as human beings.