Plutarch
THE EATING OF FLESH
[Plutarch (c. 46-120) was educated in Athens and lectured in Rome. Best known for his "Lives" -- a series of biographies of famous philosophers and politicians -- Plutarch was also an esteemed philosopher in his own right. This essay is among his most frequently cited works.]
TRACT I
You ask of me then for what reason it was that Pythagoras abstained
from eating of flesh. I for my part do much wonder in what humor,
with what soul or reason, the first man with his mouth touched
slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animal, and
having set before people courses of ghastly corpses and ghosts,
could give those parts the names of meat and victuals, that but a
little before lowed, cried, moved, and saw; how his sight could
endure the blood of slaughtered, flayed, and mangled bodies;
how his smell could bear their scent; and how the very nastiness
happened not to offend the taste, while it chewed the sores of
others, and participated of the saps and juices of deadly wounds.
Crept the raw hides, and with a bellowing sound
Roared the dead limbs; the burning entrails groaned.
("Odyssey," xii. 395.)
This indeed is but a fiction and fancy; but the fare itself is
truly monstrous and prodigious,--that a man should have a stomach
to creatures while they yet bellow, and that he should be giving
directions which of things yet alive and speaking is fittest to
make food of, and ordering the several kinds of the seasoning and
dressing them and serving them up to tables. You ought rather, in
my opinion, to have inquired who first began this practice, than
who of late times left it off.
And truly, as for those people who first ventured upon eating of
flesh, it is very probable that the whole reason of their so doing
was scarcity and want of other food; for it is not likely that
their living together in lawless and extravagant lusts, or their
growing wanton and capricious through the excessive variety of
provisions then among them, brought them to such unsociable
pleasures as these, against Nature. Yea, had they at this instant
but their sense and voice restored to them, I am persuaded they
would express themselves to this purpose:
"Oh! happy you, and highly favored of the gods, who now live!
Into what an age of the world are you fallen, who share and enjoy
among you a plentiful portion of good things! What abundance of
things spring up for your use! What fruitful vineyards you enjoy!
What wealth you gather from the fields! What delicacies from trees
and plants, which you may gather! You may glut and fill yourselves
without being polluted. As for us, we fell upon the most dismal
and affrighting part of time, in which we were exposed by our
production to manifold and inextricable wants and necessities.
As yet the thickened air concealed the heaven from our view, and
the stars were as yet confused with a disorderly huddle of fire and
moisture and violent fluxions of winds. As yet the sun was not
fixed to a regular and certain course, so as to separate morning
and evening, nor did the seasons return in order crowned with
wreaths from the fruitful harvest. The land was also spoiled by
the inundations of disorderly rivers; and a great part of it was
deformed with marshes, and utterly wild by reason of deep
quagmires, unfertile forests, and woods. There was then no
production of tame fruits, nor any instruments of art or invention
of wit. And hunger gave no time, nor did seed-time then stay for
the yearly season. What wonder is it if we made use of the flesh
of beasts contrary to Nature, when mud was eaten and the bark of
wood, and when it was thought a happy thing to find either a
sprouting grass or a root of any plant! But when they had by
chance tasted of or eaten an acorn, they danced for very joy about
some oak or esculus, calling it by the names of life-giver, mother,
and nourisher. And this was the only festival that those times
were acquainted with; upon all other occasions, all things were
full of anguish and dismal sadness. But whence is it that a
certain ravenousness and frenzy drives you in these happy days to
pollute yourselves with blood, since you have such an abundance of
things necessary for your subsistence? Why do you belie the earth
as unable to maintain you? Why do you profane the lawgiver Ceres,
and shame the mild and gentle Bacchus, as not furnishing you with
sufficiency? Are you not ashamed to mix tame fruits with blood and
slaughter? You are indeed wont to call serpents, leopards, and
lions savage creatures; but yet yourselves are defiled with blood,
and come nothing behind them in cruelty. What they kill is their
ordinary nourishment, but what you kill is your better fare."
For we eat not lions and wolves by way of revenge; but we let those
go, and catch the harmless and tame sort, and such as have neither
stings nor teeth to bite with, and slay them; which, so may Jove
help us, Nature seems to us to have produced for their beauty and
comeliness only. [Just as if one seeing the river Nilus overflowing
its banks, and thereby filling the whole country with genial and
fertile moisture, should not at all admire that secret power in it
that produces plants and plenteousness of most sweet and useful
fruits, but beholding somewhere a crocodile swimming in it, or an
asp crawling along, or mice (savage and filthy creatures), should
presently affirm these to be the occasion of all that is amiss, or
of any want or defect that may happen. Or as if indeed one
contemplating this land or ground, how full it is of tame fruits,
and how heavy with ears of corn, should afterwards espy somewhere
in these same cornfields an ear of darnel or a wild vetch, and
thereupon neglect to reap and gather in the corn, and fall a
complaining of these. Such another thing it would be, if one--
listening to the harangue of some advocate at some bar or pleading,
swelling and enlarging and hastening towards the relief of some
impending danger, or else, by Jupiter, in the impeaching and
charging of certain audacious villanies or indictments, flowing and
rolling along, and that not in a simple and poor strain, but with
many sorts of passions all at once, or rather indeed with all
sorts, in one and the same manner, into the many and various and
differing minds of either hearers or judges that he is either to
turn and change, or else, by Jupiter, to soften, appease, and quiet
--should overlook all this business, and never consider or reckon
upon the labor or struggle he had undergone, but pick up certain
loose expressions, which the rapid motion of the discourse had
carried along with it, as by the current of its course, and so had
slipped and escaped the rest of the oration, and, hereupon
undervalue the orator.]
But we are nothing put out of countenance, either by the beauteous
gayety of the colors, or by the charmingness of the musical voices,
or by the rare sagacity of the intellects, or by the cleanliness
and neatness of diet, or by the rare discretion and prudence of
these poor unfortunate animals; but for the sake of some little
mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of
that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to
enjoy. And then we fancy that the voices it utters and screams
forth to us are nothing else but certain inarticulate sounds and
noises, and not the several deprecations, entreaties, and pleadings
of each of them, as it were saying thus to us: "I deprecate not
thy necessity (if such there be), but thy wantonness. Kill me for
thy feeding, but do not take me off for thy better feeding."
O horrible cruelty! It is truly an affecting sight to see the very
table of rich people laid before them, who keep them cooks and
caterers to furnish them with dead corpses for their daily fare;
but it is yet more affecting to see it taken away, for the mammocks
remaining are more than that which was eaten. These therefore were
slain to no purpose. Others there are, who are so offended by what
is set before them that they will not suffer it to be cut or
sliced; thus abstaining from them when dead, while they would not
spare them when alive.
Well, then, we understand that that sort of men are used to say,
that in eating of flesh they follow the conduct and direction of
Nature. But that it is not natural to mankind to feed on flesh, we
first of all demonstrate from the very shape and figure of the
body. For a human body no ways resembles those that were born for
ravenousness; it hath no hawk's bill, no sharp talon, no roughness
of teeth, no such strength of stomach or heat of digestion, as can
be sufficient to convert or alter such heavy and fleshy fare.
But even from hence, that is, from the smoothness of the tongue,
and the slowness of the stomach to digest, Nature seems to disclaim
all pretence to fleshy victuals. But if you will contend that
yourself was born to an inclination to such food as you have now a
mind to eat, do you then yourself kill what you would eat. But do
it yourself, without the help of a chopping-knife, mallet, or axe,
--as wolves, bears, and lions do, who kill and eat at once.
Rend an ox with thy teeth, worry a hog with thy mouth, tear a lamb
or a hare in pieces, and fall on and eat it alive as they do.
But if thou hadst rather stay until what thou greatest is become
dead, and if thou art loath to force a soul out of its body, why
then dost thou against Nature eat an animate thing? Nay, there is
nobody that is willing to eat even a lifeless and a dead thing as
it is; but they boil it, and roast it, and alter it by fire and
medicines, as it were, changing and quenching the slaughtered gore
with thousands of sweet sauces, that the palate being thereby
deceived may admit of such uncouth fare. It was indeed a witty
expression of a Lacedaemonian, who, having purchased a small fish
in a certain inn, delivered it to his landlord to be dressed;
and as he demanded cheese, and vinegar, and oil to make sauce, he
replied, if I had had those, I would not have bought the fish.
But we are grown so wanton in our bloody luxury, that we have
bestowed upon flesh the name of meat [Greek omitted], and then
require another seasoning [Greek omitted], to this same flesh,
mixing oil, wine, honey, pickle, and vinegar, with Syrian and
Arabian spices, as though we really meant to embalm it after its
disease. Indeed when things are dissolved and made thus tender and
soft, and are as it were turned into a sort of a carrionly
corruption, it must needs be a great difficulty for concoction to
master them, and when it hath mastered them, they must needs cause
grievous oppressions and qualmy indigestions.
Diogenes ventured once to eat a raw pourcontrel, that he might
disuse himself from meat dressed by fire; and as several priests
and other people stood round him, he wrapped his head in his
cassock, and so putting the fish to his mouth, he thus said unto
them: It is for your sake, sirs, that I undergo this danger, and
run this risk. A noble and gallant risk, by Jupiter! For far
otherwise than as Pelopidas ventured his life for the liberty of
the Thebans, and Harmodius and Aristogiton for that of the
Athenians, did this philosopher encounter with a raw pourcontrel,
to the end he might make human life more brutish. Moreover, these
same flesh-eatings not only are preternatural to men's bodies, but
also by clogging and cloying them, they render their very minds and
intellects gross. For it is well known to most, that wine and much
flesh-eating make the body indeed strong and lusty, but the mind
weak and feeble. And that I may not offend the wrestlers, I will
make use of examples out of my own country. The Athenians are wont
to call us Boeotians gross, senseless, and stupid fellows, for no
other reason but our over-much eating; by Pindar we are called
hogs, for the same reason. Menander the comedian calls us "fellows
with long jaws." It is observed also that, according to the saying
of Heraclitus, "the wisest soul is like a dry light."
Earthen jars, if you strike them, will sound; but if they be full,
they perceive not the strokes that are given them. Copper vessels
also that are thin communicate the sound round about them, unless
some one stop and dull the ambient stroke with his fingers.
Moreover, the eye, when seized with an over-great plenitude of
humors, grows dim and feeble for its ordinary work. When we behold
the sun through a humid air and a great quantity of gross and
indigested vapors, we see it not clear and bright, but obscure and
cloudy, and with glimmering beams. Just so in a muddy and clogged
body, that is swagged down with heavy and unnatural nourishments;
it must needs happen that the gayety and splendor of the mind be
confused and dulled, and that it ramble and roll after little and
scarce discernible objects, since it wants clearness and vigor for
higher things.
But to pass by these considerations, is not accustoming one's self
to mildness and a human temper of mind an admirable thing? For who
would wrong or injure a man that is so sweetly and humanly disposed
with respect to the ills of strangers that are not of his kind?
I remember that three days ago, as I was discoursing, I made
mention of a saying of Xenocrates, and how the Athenians gave
judgment upon a certain person who had flayed a living ram. For my
part I cannot think him a worse criminal that torments a poor
creature while living, than a man that shall take away its life and
murder it. But (as it seems) we are more sensible of what is done
against custom than against Nature. There, however, I discussed
these matters in a more popular style. But as for that grand and
mysterious principle which (as Plato speaks) is incredible to base
minds and to such as affect only mortal things, I as little care to
move it in this discourse as a pilot doth a ship in a storm, or a
comedian his machine while the scenes are moving; but perhaps it
would not be amiss, by way of introduction and preface, to repeat
certain verses of Empedocles. ... For in these, by way of allegory,
he hints at men's souls, as that they are tied to mortal bodies, to
be punished for murders, eating of flesh and of one another,
although this doctrine seems much, ancienter than his time.
For the fables that are storied and related about the discerption
of Bacchus, and the attempts of the Titans upon him, and of their
tasting of his slain body, and of their several punishments and
fulminations afterwards, are but a representation of the
regeneration. For what in us is unreasonable, disorderly, and
boisterous, being not divine but demoniac, the ancients termed
Titans, that is, TORMENTED and PUNISHED (from [Greek omitted]). ...
TRACT II
Reason persuades us now to return with fresh cogitations and
dispositions to what we left cold yesterday of our discourse about
flesh-eating. It is indeed a hard and a difficult task to
undertake (as Cato once said) to dispute with men's bellies, that
have no ears; since most have already drunk that draught of custom,
which is like that of Ciree,
Of groans and frauds and sorcery replete.
("Odyssey," x. 234.)
And it is no easy task to pull out the hook of flesh-eating from
the jaws of such as have gorged themselves with luxury and are (as
it were) nailed down with it. It would indeed be a good action, if
as the Egyptians draw out the stomach of a dead body, and cut it
open and expose it to the sun, as the only cause of all its evil
actions, so we could, by cutting out our gluttony and blood-
shedding, purify and cleanse the remainder of our lives. For the
stomach itself is not guilty of bloodshed, but is involuntarily
polluted by our intemperance. But if this may not be, and we are
ashamed by reason of custom to live unblamably, let us at least sin
with discretion. Let us eat flesh; but let it be for hunger and
not for wantonness. Let us kill an animal; but let us do it with
sorrow and pity, and not abusing and tormenting it, as many
nowadays are used to do, while some run red-hot spits through the
bodies of swine, that by the tincture of the quenched iron the
blood may be to that degree mortified, that it may sweeten and
soften the flesh in its circulation; others jump and stamp upon the
udders of sows that are ready to pig, that so they may crush into
one mass (O Piacular Jupiter!) in the very pangs of delivery,
blood, milk, and the corruption of the mashed and mangled young
ones, and so eat the most inflamed part of the animal; others sew
up the eyes of cranes and swans, and so shut them up in darkness to
be fattened, and then souse up their flesh with certain monstrous
mixtures and pickles.
By all which it is most manifest, that it is not for nourishment,
or want, or any necessity, but for mere gluttony, wantonness, and
expensiveness, that they make a pleasure of villany. Just as it
happens in persons who cannot satiate their passion upon women, and
having made trial of everything else and falling into vagaries, at
last attempt things not to be mentioned; even so inordinateness in
feeding, when it hath once passed the bounds of nature and
necessity, studies at last to diversify the lusts of its
intemperate appetite by cruelty and villany. For the senses, when
they once quit their natural measures, sympathize with each other
in their distempers, and are enticed by each other to the same
consent and intemperance. Thus a distempered ear first debauched
music, the soft and effeminate notes of which provoke immodest
touches and lascivious tickling. These things first taught the eye
not to delight in Pyrrhic dances, gesticulations of hands, or
elegant pantomimes, nor in statues and fine paintings; but to
reckon the slaughtering and death of mankind and wounds and duels
the most sumptuous of shows and spectacles. Thus unlawful tables
are accompanied with intemperate copulations, with unmusicianlike
balls, and theatres become monstrous through shameful songs and
rehearsals; and barbarous and brutish shows are again accompanied
with an unrelenting temper and savage cruelty towards mankind.
Hence it was that the divine Lycurgus in his Three Books of Laws
gave orders that the doors and ridges of men's houses should be
made with a saw and an axe, and that no other instrument should so
much as be brought to any house. Not that he did hereby intend to
declare war against augers and planes and other instruments of
finer work; but because he very well knew that with such tools as
these you will never bring into your house a gilded couch, and that
you will never attempt to bring into a slender cottage either
silver tables, purple carpets, or costly stones; but that a plain
supper and a homely dinner must accompany such a house, couch
table, and cup. The beginning of a vicious diet is presently
followed by all sorts of luxury and expensiveness,
Ev'n as a mare is by her thirsty colt.
=============
And what meal is not expensive? One for which no animal is put to
death. Shall we reckon a soul to be a small expense? I will not
say perhaps of a mother, or a father, or of some friend, or child,
as Empedocles did; but one participating of feeling, of seeing, of
hearing, of imagination, and of intellection; which each animal
hath received from Nature for the acquiring of what is agreeable to
it, and the avoiding what is disagreeable. Do but consider this
with yourself now, which sort of philosophers render us most tame
and civil, they who bid people to feed on their children, friends,
fathers, and wives, when they are dead; or Pythagoras and
Empedocles, that accustom men to be just towards even the other
members of the creation. You laugh at a man that will not eat a
sheep: but we (they will say again)--when we see you cutting off
the parts of your dead father or mother, and sending it to your
absent friends, and calling upon and inviting your present friends
to eat the rest freely and heartily--shall we not smile?
Nay, peradventure we offend at this instant time while we touch
these books, without having first cleansed our hands, eyes, feet,
and ears; if it be not (by Jupiter) a sufficient purgation of them
to have discoursed of these matters in potable and fresh language
(as Plato speaketh), thereby washing off the brackishness of
hearing. Now if a man should set these books and discourses in
opposition to each other, he will find that the philosophy of the
one sort suits with the Seythians, Sogdians, and Melanchlaenians,
of whom Herodotus's relation is scarce believed; but the sentiments
of Pythagoras and Empedocles were the laws and customs of the
ancients Grecians.
Who, then, were the first authors of this opinion, that we owe no
justice to dumb animals?
Who first beat out accursed steel,
And made the lab'ring ox a knife to feel.
In the very same manner oppressors and tyrants begin first to shed
blood. For example, the first man that the Athenians ever put to
death was one of the basest of all knaves, who had the reputation
of deserving it; after him they put to death a second and a third.
After this, being now accustomed to blood, they patiently saw
Niceratus the son of Nicias, and their own general Theramenes, and
Polemarchus the philosopher suffer death. Even so, in the
beginning, some wild and mischievous beast was killed and eaten,
and then some little bird or fish was entrapped. And the desire of
slaughter, being first experimented and exercised in these, at last
passed even to the laboring ox, and the sheep that clothes us, and
to the poor cock that keeps the house; until by little and little,
unsatiableness, being strengthened by use, men came to the
slaughter of men, to bloodshed and wars. Now even if one cannot
demonstrate and make out, that souls in their regenerations make a
promiscuous use of all bodies, and that that which is now rational
will at another time be irrational, and that again tame which is
now wild,--for that Nature changes and transmutes everything,
With different fleshy coats new clothing all,--
this thing should be sufficient to change and show men, that it is
a savage and intemperate habit, that it brings sickness and
heaviness upon the body, and that it inclines the mind the more
brutishly to bloodshed and destruction, when we have once
accustomed ourselves neither to entertain a guest nor keep a
wedding nor to treat our friends without blood and slaughter.
And if what is argued about the return of souls into bodies is not
of force enough to beget faith, yet methinks the very uncertainty
of the thing should fill us with apprehension and fear.
Suppose, for instance, one should in some night-engagement run on
with his drawn sword upon one that had fallen down and covered his
body with his arms, and should in the meantime hear one say, that
he was not very sure, but that he fancied and believed, that the
party lying there was his own son, brother, father, or tent-
companion; which were more advisable, think you,--to hearken to a
false suggestion, and so to let go an enemy under the notion of a
friend, or to slight an authority not sufficient to beget faith,
and to slay a friend instead of a foe? This you will all say would
be insupportable. Do but consider the famous Merope in the
tragedy, who taking up a hatchet, and lifting it at her son's head,
whom she took for her son's murderer, speaks thus as she was ready
to give the fatal blow,
Villain, this holy blow shall cleave thy head;
(Euripides, "Cresphontes," Frag. 457.)
what a bustle she raises in the whole theatre while she raises
herself to give the blow, and what a fear they are all in, lest she
should prevent the old man that comes to stop her hand, and should
wound the youth. Now if another old man should stand by her and
say, "Strike, it is thy enemy," and this, "Hold, it is thy son";
which, think you, would be the greater injustice, to omit the
punishing of an enemy for the sake of one's child, or to suffer
one's self to be so carried away with anger at an enemy as to slay
one's child? Since then neither hatred nor wrath nor any revenge
nor fear for ourselves carries us to the slaughter of a beast, but
the poor sacrifice stands with an inclined neck, only to satisfy
thy lust and pleasure, and then one philosopher stands by and tells
thee, "Cut him down, it is but an unreasonable animal," and another
cries, "Hold, what if there should be the soul of some kinsman or
god enclosed in him?"--good gods! is there the like danger if I
refuse to eat flesh, as if I for want of faith murder my child or
some other friend?
The Stoics' way of reasoning upon this subject of flesh-eating is
no way equal nor consonant with themselves. Who is this that hath
so many mouths for his belly and the kitchen? Whence comes it to
pass, that they so very much womanize and reproach pleasure, as a
thing that they will not allow to be either good or preferable, or
so much as agreeable, and yet all on a sudden become so zealous
advocates for pleasures? It were indeed but a reasonable
consequence of their doctrine, that, since they banish perfumes and
cakes from their banquets, they should be much more averse to blood
and to flesh. But now, just as if they would reduce their
philosophy to their account-books, they lessen the expenses of
their suppers in certain unnecessary and needless matters, but the
untamed and murderous part of their expense they nothing boggle at.
"Well! What then?" say they. "We have nothing to do with brute
beasts." Nor have you any with perfumes, nor with foreign sauces,
may some one answer; therefore leave these out of your banquets, if
you are driving out everything that is both useless and needless.
Let us therefore in the next place consider, whether we owe any
justice to the brute beasts. Neither shall we handle this point
artificially, or like subtle sophisters, but by casting our eye
into our own breasts, and conversing with ourselves as men, we will
weigh and examine the whole matter. ...