On the eating of flesh II (1-5)

Reason urges us with fresh ideas and fresh zeal to attack again our yesterday’s discourse[*] on the eating of flesh. It is indeed difficult, as Cato[*] remarked, to talk to bellies which have no ears. And the potion of familiarity has been drunk, like that of Circe[*]

Commingling pains and pangs, tricks and tears[*];

nor is it easy to extract the hook of flesh-eating, entangled as it is and embedded in the love of pleasure. And, like the Egyptians e who extract the viscera of the dead and cut them open in view of the sun, then throw them away as being the cause of every single sin that the man had committed, it would be well for us to excise our own gluttony and lust to kill and become pure for the remainder of our lives, since it is not so much our belly that drives us to the pollution of slaughter; it is itself polluted by our incontinence. Yet if, for heaven’s sake, it is really impossible for us to be free from error because we are on such terms of familiarity with it, let us at least be ashamed of our ill doing and resort to it only in reason. We shall eat flesh, but from hunger, not as a luxury. We shall kill an animal, but in pity and sorrow, not degrading or torturing it - which is the current practice in many cases, some thrusting red-hot spits into the throats of swine so that by the plunging in of the iron the blood may be emulsified and, as it circulates through the body, may make the flesh tender and delicate. Others jump upon the udders of sows[*] about to give birth and kick them so that, when they have blended together blood and milk and gore (Zeus the Purifier!) and the unborn young have at the same time been destroyed at the moment of birth, they may eat the most inflamed part of the creature. Still others sew up the eyes of cranes[*] and swans,[*] shut them up in darkness and fatten them, making the flesh appetizing with strange compounds and spicy mixtures.

From these practices it is perfectly evident that it is not for nourishment or need or necessity, but out of satiety and insolence and luxury that they have turned this lawless custom into a pleasure. Then, just as with women who are insatiable in seeking pleasure, their lust tries everything, goes astray, and explores the gamut of profligacy until at last it ends in unspeakable practices; so intemperance in eating passes beyond the necessary ends of nature and resorts to cruelty and lawlessness to give

variety to appetite. For it is in their own company that organs of sense are infected and won over and become licentious when they do not keep to natural standards. Just so the art of hearing has fallen sick, corrupting musical taste. From this our luxury and debauchery conceives a desire for shameful caresses and effeminate titillations. These taught the sight not to take pleasure in warlike exercises[*] or gesticulations or refined dances or statues and paintings, but to regard the slaughter and death of men, their wounds and combats, as the most precious sort of spectacle.[*] Just so intemperate intercourse follows a lawless meal, inharmonious music follows a shameful debauch, barbarous spectacles follow shameless songs and sounds, insensitivity and cruelty toward human kind follow savage exhibitions in the theatre. It was for this reason that the godlike Lycurgus[*] gave directions in certain rhetrae [*] that the doors and roofs of houses should be fashioned by saw and axe alone and no other tool should be used-not of course because he had a quarrel with gimlets and adzes and other instruments for delicate work. It was because he knew that through such rough-hewn work you will not be introducing a gilded couch, nor will you be so rash as to bring silver tables and purple rugs and precious stones into a simple house. The corollary of such a house and couch and table and cup is a dinner which is unpretentious and a lunch which is truly democratic; but all manner of luxury and extravagance follow the lead of an evil way of life

As new-weaned foal beside his mother runs.[*]

For what sort of dinner is not costly for which a living creature loses its life? Do we hold a life cheap? I do not yet go so far as to say that it may well be the life[*] of your mother or father or some friend or child, as Empedocles[*] declared. Yet it does, at least, possess some perception, hearing, seeing, imagination, intelligence, which last every creature receives from Nature to enable it to acquire what is proper for it and to evade what is not. Do but consider which are the philosophers who serve the better to humanize us: those[*] who bid us eat our children and friends and fathers and wives after their death,[*] or Pythagoras[*] and Empedocles who try to accustom us to act justly toward other creatures also? You ridicule a man who abstains from eating mutton. But are we, they[*] will say, to refrain from laughter when we see you slicing off portions from a dead father or mother and sending them to absent friends and inviting those who are at hand, heaping their

plates with flesh? But as it is, perhaps we commit a sin when we touch these books of theirs without cleansing our hands and faces, our feet and ears - unless, by Heaven, it is a purification of those members to speak on such a subject as this, washing, as Plato[*] says, the brine from one’s ears with the fresh water of discourse. If one should compare these two sets of books and doctrines,[*] the former may serve as philosophy for the Scyths and Sogdians and the Black Cloaks, whose story as told by Herodotus[*] gains no credit[*]; but the precepts of Pythagoras[*] and Empedocles were the laws for the ancient Greeks, along with their diet of wheat ⋯[*] [Because there is no question of justice between us and the irrational animals.]

Who, then, were they who later decreed this?

The first to forge the highway’s murderous sword,

And first to eat the flesh of ploughing ox.[*]

This is the way, you may be sure, in which tyrants begin their course of bloody slaughters. Just as, for instance, at Athens[*] they put to death initially the worst of the sycophants, and likewise in the second and third instances; but next, having become accustomed to bloodshed they allowed Niceratus,[*] the son of Nicias, to be killed and the general Theramenes[*] and the philosopher Polemarchus.[*] Just so, at the beginning it was some wild and harmful animal that was eaten, then a bird or fish that had its flesh torn. And so when our murderous instincts had tasted blood and grew practised on wild animals, they advanced to the labouring ox and the well-behaved sheep and the house-warding cock; thus, little by little giving a hard edge to our insatiable appetite, we have advanced to wars and the slaughter and murder of human beings. Yet if someone once demonstrates that souls in their rebirths make use of common bodies and that what is now rational reverts to the irrational, and again what is now wild becomes tame, and that Nature changes everything and assigns new dwellings

Clothing souls with unfamiliar coat of flesh[*];

will not this deter the unruly element in those who have adopted the doctrine from implanting disease and indigestion[*] in our bodies and perverting our souls to an ever more cruel lawlessness, as soon as we are broken of the habit of not entertaining a guest or celebrating a marriage or consorting with our friends without bloodshed and murder?

Yet even if the argument of the migration of souls from body to body is not demonstrated to the point of complete belief, there is enough doubt to make us quite cautious and fearful. It is as though in a clash of armies by night[*] you had drawn your sword and were rushing at a man whose fallen body was hidden by his armour and should hear someone remarking that he wasn’t quite sure, but that he thought and believed that the prostrate figure was that of your son or brother or father or tent-mate - which would be the better course: to approve a false suspicion and spare your enemy as a friend, or to disregard an uncertain authority and kill your friend as a foe? The latter course you will declare to be shocking. Consider also Merope[*] in the play raising her axe against her son himself because she believes him to be that son’s murderer and saying

This blow I give you is more costly yet -

what a stir she rouses in the theatre as she brings them to their feet in terror lest she wound the youth before the old man can stop her! Now suppose one old man stood beside her saying, Hit him! He’s your enemy, and another who said, Don’t strike! He is your son: which would be the greater misdeed, to omit the punishment of an enemy because of the son, or to slay a child under the impulse of anger against an enemy? In a ease, then, where it is not hate or anger or self-defence or fear for ourselves that induces us to murder, but the motive of pleasure, and the victim stands there under our power with its head bent back and one of our philosophers says, Kill it! It’s only a brute beast; but the other says, Stop! What if the soul of some relative or friend has found its way into this body? - Good God! Of course the risk is equal or much the same in the two cases - if I refuse to eat flesh, or if I, disbelieving, kill my child or some other relative!