On the eating of flesh I (intro-1)

These two badly mutilated discourses, urging the necessity for vegetarianism, are merely extracts from a series (see 996 a) which Plutarch delivered in his youth, perhaps to a Boeotian audience (995 e).[*] In spite of the exaggerated and calculated rhetoric[*] these fragments probably depict faithfully a foible of Plutarch’s early manhood, the Pythagorean or Orphic[*] abstention from animal food. There is little trace of this in his later life as known to us, though a corrupt passage in the Symposiacs (635 e) seems to say that because of a dream our author abstained from eggs for a long time. In the De Sanitate Tuenda also (132 a) Plutarch excuses flesh-eating on the ground that habit has become a sort of unnatural second nature.

The work appears, on the whole, rather immature beside the Gryllus and the De Sollertia Animalium, but the text is so poor that this may not be the author’s fault. In fact the excerptor responsible for our jumbled text, introducing both stupid interpolations (see especially 998 a) and even an extract from an entirely different work (994 b-d), may well have

altered Plutarch’s wording in many other places where we have not the means to detect him.

Porphyry[*] (De Abstinentia, iii. 24) says that Plutarch attacked the Stoics and Peripatetics in many books; in this one the anti-Stoic polemic has only just begun (999 a) when the work breaks off. For a more complete assault the reader must turn back to the two preceding dialogues.

It is interesting to learn that Shelley found these fragments inspiring. In the eighth book of Queen Mab (verses 211 ff.) we read:

No longer now

He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,

And horribly devours his mangled flesh,

Which, still avenging Nature’s broken law,

Kindled all putrid humours in his frame,

All evil passions, and all vain belief,⋯

The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.

To this passage the poet appended, more suo, a long note which ended with four quotations from our essay in Greek, untranslated (a compliment to the public of his day, one may suppose). This note he subsequently republished as A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813), omitting the Greek; and in the same year he wrote to Thomas Hogg that he had translated the two Essays of Plutarch, Περὶ σαρκοφαγίας. But this has been lost; it has not, at least, been found among the unpublished Shelley material in the Bodleian.[*]

This is one of the eighteen works of the received Corpus of Plutarch that do not appear in the Lamprias Catalogue. Such a fact is not, however, to be adduced against its genuineness, since the Symposiacs themselves are not to be found there.[*]

Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras[*] had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man[*] who did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale[*] bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?

The skins shivered; and upon the spits the flesh bellowed,

Both cooked and raw; the voice of kine was heard.[*]

Though this is an invention and a myth, yet that sort of dinner is really portentous - when a man craves the meat that is still bellowing, giving instructions which tell us on what animals we are to feed while they are still alive uttering their cries, and organizing various methods of seasoning and roasting and serving. It is the man[*] who first began these practices that one should seek out, not him who all too late desisted.[*]