[17] Translated by Davies and Vaughan. 1874.
[18] The four sacred Pythagorean virtues—justice, temperance, wisdom, fortitude. See notice of Plato above.
[19] Upon which excellent maxim Hierokles justly remarks: “The judge here appointed is the most just of all, and the one which is [ought to be] most at home with us, viz.: conscience and right reason.”
[20] Nineteenth Century, October, 1877. The Greek original of the Golden Verses is found in the text of Mullach, in Fragmenta Philosophorum Græcorum. Paris, 1860.
[21] The Romans, we may remark, imported the gladiatorial fights from Spain.
[22] Hist. Naturalis VIII. 7. His nephew says of these huge slaughter-houses that “there is no novelty, no variety, or anything that could not be seen once for all.” On one occasion, in the year A.D. 284, we are credibly informed that 1,000 ostriches, 1,000 stags, 1,000 fallow-deer, besides numerous wild sheep and goats, were mingled together for indiscriminate slaughter by the wild beasts of the forest or the equally wild beasts of the city. (See Decline and Fall.)
[23] Some traces of it may be found, e.g., in Lucretius (De Rerum Nat. II., where see his touching picture of the bereaved mother-cow, whose young is ravished from her for the horrid sacrificial altar); Virgil (Æneis VII.), in his story of Silvia’s deer—the most touching passage in the poem; Pliny, Hist. Nat. In earlier Greek literature, Euripides seems most in sympathy with suffering—at least as regards his own species.
[24] I see and approve the better way; I pursue the worse.—Metam. vii., 20.
[25] In a note on this passage Lipsius, the famous Dutch commentator, remarks: “I am quite in accord with this feeling. The constant use of flesh meat (assidua κρεοφαγία) by Europeans makes them stupid and irrational (brutos).”
[26] Lipsius suggests, with much reason, that Seneca actually wrote the opposite respecting his father, “who had no dislike for this philosophy, but who feared calumny,” &c.