On the eating of flesh II (4-5)

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!