“He [Pythagoras], too, was the first to forbid animals to be served up at the table, and he was first to open his lips, indeed full of wisdom yet all unheeded, in the following words: ‘Forbear, O mortals! to pollute your bodies with such abominable food. There are the farinacea (fruges), there are the fruits which bear down the branches with their weight, and there are the grapes swelling on the vines; there are the sweet herbs; there are those that may be softened by the flame and become tender. Nor is the milky juice denied you; nor honey, redolent of the flower of thyme. The lavish Earth heaps up her riches and her gentle foods, and offers you dainties without blood and without slaughter. The lower animals satisfy their ravenous hunger with flesh. And yet not all of them; for the horse, the sheep, the cows and oxen subsist on grass; while those whose disposition is cruel and fierce, the tigers of Armenia and the raging lions, and the wolves and bears, revel in their bloody diet.
“‘Alas! what a monstrous crime it is (scelus) that entrails should be entombed in entrails; that one ravening body should grow fat on others which it crams into it; that one living creature should live by the death of another living creature! Amid so great an abundance which the Earth—that best of mothers—produces does, indeed, nothing delight you but to gnaw with savage teeth the sad produce of the wounds you inflict and to imitate the habits of the Cyclops? Can you not appease the hunger of a voracious and ill-regulated stomach unless you first destroy another being? Yet that age of old, to which we have given the name of golden, was blest in the produce of the trees and in the herbs which the earth brings forth, and the human mouth was not polluted with blood.
“‘Then the birds moved their wings secure in the air, and the hare, without fear, wandered in the open fields. Then the fish did not fall a victim to the hook and its own credulity. Every place was void of treachery; there was no dread of injury—all things were full of peace. In later ages some one—a mischievous innovator (non utilis auctor), whoever he was—set at naught and scorned this pure and simple food, and engulfed in his greedy paunch victuals made from a carcase. It was he that opened the road to wickedness. I can believe that the steel, since stained with blood, was first dipped in the gore of savage wild beasts; and that was lawful enough. We hold that the bodies of animals that seek our destruction are put to death without any breach of the sacred laws of morality. But although they might be put to death they were not to be eaten as well. From this time the abomination advanced rapidly. The swine is believed to have been the first victim destined to slaughter, because it grubbed up the seeds with its broad snout, and so cut short the hopes of the year. For gnawing and injuring the vine the goat was led to slaughter at the altars of the avenging Bacchus. Its own fault was the ruin of each of these victims.
“‘But how have you deserved to die, ye sheep, you harmless breed that have come into existence for the service of men—who carry nectar in your full udders—who give your wool as soft coverings for us—who assist us more by your life than by your death? Why have the oxen deserved this—beings without guile and without deceit—innocent, mild, born for the endurance of labour? Ungrateful, indeed, is man, and unworthy of the bounteous gifts of the harvest who, after unyoking him from the plough, can slaughter the tiller of his fields—who can strike with the axe that neck worn bare with labour, through which he had so often turned up the hard ground, and which had afforded so many a harvest.
“‘And it is not enough that such wickedness is committed by men. They have involved the gods themselves in this abomination, and they believe that a Deity in the heavens can rejoice in the slaughter of the laborious and useful ox. The spotless victim, excelling in the beauty of its form (for its very beauty is the cause of its destruction), decked out with garlands and with gold is placed before their altars, and, ignorant of the purport of the proceedings, it hears the prayers of the priest. It sees the fruits which it cultivated placed on its head between its horns, and, struck down, with its life-blood it dyes the sacrificial knife which it had perhaps already seen in the clear water. Immediately they inspect the nerves and fibres torn from the yet living being, and scrutinise the will of the gods in them.
“‘From whence such a hunger in man after unnatural and unlawful food? Do you dare, O mortal race, to continue to feed on flesh? Do it not, I beseech you, and give heed to my admonitions. And when you present to your palates the limbs of slaughtered oxen, know and feel that you are feeding on the tillers of the ground.’”—Metam. xv., 73–142.
V.
SENECA. DIED 65 A.D.
LUCIUS ANNÆUS SENECA, the greatest name in the stoic school of philosophy, and the first of Latin moralists, was born at Corduba (Cordova) almost contemporaneously with the beginning of the Christian era. His family, like that of Ovid, was of the equestrian order. He was of a weakly constitution; and bodily feebleness, as with many other great intellects, served to intensify if not originate, the activity of the mind. At Rome, with which he early made acquaintance, he soon gained great distinction at the bar; and the eloquence and fervour he displayed in the Senate before the Emperor Caligula excited the jealous hatred of that insane tyrant. Later in life he obtained a prætorship, and he was also appointed to the tutorship of the young Domitius, afterwards the Emperor Nero. On the accession of that prince, at the age of seventeen, to the imperial throne, Seneca became one of his chief advisers.
Unfortunately for his credit as a philosopher, while exerting his influence to restrain the vicious propensities of his old pupil, he seems to have been too anxious to acquire, not only a fair proportion of wealth, but even an enormous fortune, and his villas and gardens were of so splendid a kind as to provoke the jealousy and covetousness of Nero. This, added to his alleged disparagement of the prince’s talents, especially in singing and driving, for which Nero particularly desired to be famous, was the cause of his subsequent disgrace and death. The philosopher prudently attempted to anticipate the will of Nero by a voluntary surrender of all his accumulated possessions, and he sought to disarm the jealous suspicions of the tyrant by a retired and unostentatious life. These precautions were of no avail; his death was already decided. He was accused of complicity in the conspiracy of Piso, and the only grace allowed him was to be his own executioner. The despair of his wife, Pompeia Paulina, he attempted to mitigate by the reflection that his life had been always directed by the standard of a higher morality. Nothing, however, could dissuade her from sharing her husband’s fate, and the two faithful friends laid open their veins by the same blow.