INTRODUCTION

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).This was Hirzel’s opinion (, ii, p. 126, n. 2), which Ziegler (, s.v. Plutarchos, col. 734) combats. In spite of the exaggerated and calculated rhetoricF. Krauss, , pp. 77 ff. these fragments probably depict faithfully a foible of Plutarch’s early manhood, the Pythagorean or OrphicPlato, , 782 c. Plutarch, 159 c, makes Solon say, To refrain entirely from eating meat, as they record of Orpheus long ago, is rather a quibble than a way of avoiding wrong diet. abstention from animal food. There is little trace of this in his later life as known to us, though a corrupt passage in the (635 e) seems to say that because of a dream our author abstained from eggs for a long time. In the 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 and the , 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.

PorphyryIt is, of course, possible that Porphyry used some portion of the missing parts of our work; but this cannot be proved and may even be thought unlikely in view of the fact that he makes no use of any extant portion. (, 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 (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 (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.These facts I owe to the kindness of Professors J. A. Notopoulos of Trinity College and J. E. Jordan of the University of California; see also K. N. Cameron, , pp. 224 f.

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 themselves are not to be found there.It is important to observe that H. Fuchs, , p. 49, n. 60, athetizes this work. A further discussion by this great critic would be warmly welcomed, especially since Wilamowitz recognized here also den unverkennbaren Stempel der plutarchischen Art.