On the eating of flesh II (3)

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.]