On the eating of flesh I (intro-4)

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 But this has been lost; it has not, at least, been found among the unpublished Shelley material in the Bodleian.[*]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.[*]

Or would everyone declare that the reason for those who first instituted flesh-eating was the necessity of their poverty? It was not while they passed their time in unlawful desires nor when they had necessaries in abundance that after indulgence in unnatural and antisocial pleasures they resorted to such a practice. If, at this moment, they could recover feelings and voice, they might, indeed, remark: Oh blessed and beloved of the gods, you who live now, what an age has fallen to your lot wherein you enjoy and assimilate a heritage abounding in good things! How many plants grow for you! What vintages you gather! What wealth you may draw from the plains and what pleasant sustenance from trees! Why, you may even live luxuriously without the stain of blood. But as for us, it was a most dismal and fearful portion of the world’s history[*] that confronted us, falling as we did into great and unbearable poverty brought on by our first appearance among the living. As yet the heavens and the stars were concealed by dense air that was contaminated with turbid moisture, not easily to be penetrated, and fire and furious wind. Not yet was

the sun established undeviating

In his firm course,

Dividing day and night; he brought them back

Again and crowned them with the fruitful hours

All wreathed with bloom, while violence

had been done to earth by rivers pouring forth their floods at random and most parts were deformed by pools.[*] Earth was made a wilderness by deep quagmires and the unfruitful growth of thickets and forests; nor was there as yet any agricultural production or professional tool or any resource of skill. Our hunger gave us no respite nor was there any seed at that time awaiting the annual season of sowing. What wonder if, contrary to nature, we made use of the flesh of beasts when even mud was eaten and the bark of trees devoured, and to light on sprouting grass or the root of a rush was a piece of luck? When we had tasted and eaten acorns we danced for joy around some oak,[*] calling it life-giving [*] and mother and nurse. This was the only festival that those times had discovered; all else was a medley of anguish and gloom. But you who live now, what madness, what frenzy drives you to the pollution of shedding blood, you who have such a superfluity of necessities? Why slander the earth by implying that she cannot support you? Why impiously offend law-giving Demeter[*] and bring shame upon Dionysus, lord of the cultivated vine,[*] the gracious one, as if you did not receive enough from their hands? Are you not ashamed to mingle domestic crops with blood and gore? You call serpents and panthers and lions savage, but you yourselves, by your own foul slaughters, leave them no room to outdo you in cruelty; for their slaughter is their living, yours is a mere appetizer. [*]

It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defence; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace⋯ [*]

[It is as though one, seeing the Nile overflow its banks, filling the landscape with its fertile and productive stream, should not marvel at this, its nourishing of plants and its fruitfulness in such crops as are most to be cultivated and contribute most to the support of life, but should espy a crocodile swimming there somewhere or an asp being swept along or a thousand other savage creatures and should cite them as the reasons for his censure and his compulsion to do as he does.[*] Or, I swear, it is as though one fixed ones gaze on this land and its soil covered with cultivated crops and heavy with ears of wheat, and then, looking beneath these rich harvests, one were to catch sight somewhere of a

growth of darnel or broom-rape and, without more ado, ceasing to reap the benefit and claim the booty of the good crops, burst into a tirade about the weeds. Another example: if one should see an orator making a speech at some trial where he was advocate, a speech in which his eloquence in full flood was advancing to the succour of someone in jeopardy or (so help me) to the conviction or denunciation of rash acts or defaults - a flood of eloquence not simple or jejune, but charged with many (or rather all kinds of) emotional appeals for the simultaneous influencing of the many different kinds of minds in the audience or jury, which must either be roused and won over or (by heaven!) soothed and made gentle and calm - then if one neglected to observe and take into account this main point and issue of the matter, but merely picked out flaws of style that the flood of oratory, as it moved to its goal, had swept along by the momentum of its current, flaws that came rushing out and slipped by with the rest - and seeing ⋯ of some popular leader ⋯ [*]]

But nothing abashed us, not the flower-like tinting of the flesh, not the persuasiveness of the harmonious voice, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being. Then we go on to assume that when they utter cries and squeaks their speech is inarticulate, that they do not, begging for mercy, entreating, seeking justice,

each one of them say, I do not ask to be spared in ease of necessity; only spare me your arrogance! Kill me to eat, but not to please your palate! Oh, the cruelty of it! What a terrible thing it is to look on when the tables of the rich are spread, men who employ cooks and spicers to groom the dead! And it is even more terrible to look on when they are taken away, for more is left than has been eaten. So the beasts died for nothing! There are others who refuse when the dishes are already set before them and will not have them cut into or sliced. Though they bid spare the dead, they did not spare the living.[*]