“O flock that liest at rest, O blessed thou
That knowest not thy fate, however hard,
How utterly I envy thee!”
Cicero’s more virile mind would have spurned this craving to renounce the distinguishing human privilege for the bliss of ignorance.
Wherever we fix the limits of animal intelligence, there is no question of man’s obligation to treat sentient creatures with humanity. This was recognised by Marcus Aurelius when he wrote the golden precept: “As to animals which have no reason ... do thou, since thou hast reason, and they have none, make use of them with a generous and liberal spirit.” Here we have the broadest application of the narrowest assumption. From the time, at least, that Rome was full of Greek teachers, there were always some partisans of a different theory altogether. What Seneca calls “the illustrious but unpopular school of Pythagoras” had a little following which made up by its sincere enthusiasm for the fewness of its members. Seneca’s own master Sotio was of this school, and his teaching made a deep impression on the most illustrious of his pupils, who sums up its chief points with his usual lucidity: Pythagoras gave men a horror of crime and of parricide by telling them that they might unawares kill or devour their own fathers; all sentient beings are bound together in a universal kinship and an endless transmutation causes them to pass from one form to another; no soul perishes or ceases its activity save in the moment when it changes its envelope. Sotio took for granted that the youths who attended his classes came to him with minds unprepared to receive these doctrines, and he aimed more at making them accept the consequences of the theory than the theory itself. What if they believed none of it? What if they did not believe that souls passed through different bodies and that the thing we call death is a transmigration? That in the animal which crops the grass or which peoples the sea, a soul resides which once was human? That, like the heavenly bodies, every soul traverses its appointed circle? That nothing in this world perishes, but only changes scene and place? Let them remember, nevertheless, that great men have believed all this: “Suspend your judgment, and in the meantime, respect whatever has life.” If the doctrine be true, then to abstain from animal flesh is to spare oneself the committal of crimes; if it be false, such abstinence is commendable frugality; “all you lose is the food of lions and vultures.”
Sotio himself was a thorough Pythagorean, but there was another philosopher of the name of Sestius who was an ardent advocate of abstinence from animal food without believing in the transmigration of souls. He founded a sort of brotherhood, the members of which took the pledge to abide by this rule. He argued that since plenty of other wholesome food existed, what need was there for man to shed blood? Cruelty must become habitual when people devour flesh to indulge the palate: “let us reduce the elements of sensuality.” Health would be also the gainer by the adoption of a simpler and less various diet. Sotio used these arguments of one whom he might have called an unbeliever, to reinforce his own.
Seneca does not say if many of his schoolfellows were as much impressed as he was by this teaching. For a year he abstained from flesh, and when he got accustomed to it, he even found the new diet easy and agreeable. His mind seemed to grow more active. That he was allowed to eat what he liked without encountering interference or ridicule shows the considerable freedom in which the youth of Rome was brought up: this made them men. But at the beginning of the reign of Tiberius there went forth an edict against foreign cults, and abstinence from flesh was held to show a leaning towards religious novelties. For this reason the elder Seneca advised his son to give up vegetarianism. Seneca honestly confesses that he went back to better fare without much urging; yet he always remained frugal, and he seems never to have felt quite sure that his youthful experiment did not agree best with the counsels of perfection.
IV
PLUTARCH THE HUMANE
PLUTARCH was the Happy Philosopher—and there were not many that were happy. A life of travel, a life of teaching, an honoured old age as the priest of Apollo in his native village in Bœotia: what kinder fate than this? He was happy in the very obscurity which seems to have surrounded his life at Rome, for it saved him from spite and envy. He was happy, if we may trust the traditional effigies, even in that thing which likewise is a good gift of the gods, a gracious outward presence exactly corresponding with the soul within. A painter who wished to draw a type of illimitable compassionateness would choose the face attributed to Plutarch. Finally, this gentle sage is happy still after eighteen hundred years in doing more than any other writer of antiquity to build up character by diffusing the radiance of noble deeds. Nevertheless, were he to come back to life he would have one disappointment, and that would be to find how few people read his essays on kindness to animals: they would stand a better chance of being read if they were printed alone, but to arrive at them you must dive in the formidable depths of the Moralia: a very storehouse of interesting things, but hardly attractive to the general in a hurried age. Some of its treasures have been revealed by Dr. Oakesmith in his admirable monograph on “The Religion of Plutarch.” The mine of nobly humane sentiment remains, however, almost unexplored.