ON THE EATING OF FLESH (DE ESU CARNIUM) I
INTRODUCTION
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).
1
In spite of the exaggerated and calculated rhetoric
2
these fragments probably depict faithfully a foible
of Plutarch's early manhood, the Pythagorean or
Orphic
3 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
[p. 538]
altered Plutarch's wording in many other places
where we have not the means to detect him.
Porphyry
4 (
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the unpublished Shelley material in the Bodleian.
5
[p. 539]
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.
6