If we shall compare these sentiments of the pagan humanitarian with the every-day practices of modern christian society in the matter, e.g., of “knackers’ yards,” and other similar methods of getting rid of dumb dependants after a life-time of continuous hard labour—perhaps of bad usage, and even semi-starvation—the comparison scarcely will be in favour of christian ethics. From the essay On Flesh-Eating we extract the principal and most significant passages:—
PLUTARCH—ESSAY ON FLESH-EATING.
“You ask me upon what grounds Pythagoras abstained from feeding on the flesh of animals. I, for my part, marvel of what sort of feeling, mind, or reason, that man was possessed who was the first to pollute his mouth with gore, and to allow his lips to touch the flesh of a murdered being: who spread his table with the mangled forms of dead bodies, and claimed as his daily food what were but now beings endowed with movement, with perception, and with voice.
“How could his eyes endure the spectacle of the flayed and dismembered limbs? How could his sense of smell endure the horrid effluvium? How, I ask, was his taste not sickened by contact with festering wounds, with the pollution of corrupted blood and juices? ‘The very hides began to creep, and the flesh, both roast and raw, groaned on the spits, and the slaughtered oxen were endowed, as it might seem, with human voice.’[47] This is poetic fiction; but the actual feast of ordinary life is, of a truth, a veritable portent—that a human being should hunger after the flesh of oxen actually bellowing before him, and teach upon what parts one should feast, and lay down elaborate rules about joints and roastings and dishes. The first man who set the example of this savagery is the person to arraign; not, assuredly, that great mind which, in a later age, determined to have nothing to do with such horrors.
“For the wretches who first applied to flesh-eating may justly be alleged in excuse their utter resourcelessness and destitution, inasmuch as it was not to indulge in lawless desires, or amidst the superfluities of necessaries, for the pleasure of wanton indulgence in unnatural luxuries that they [the primeval peoples] betook themselves to carnivorous habits.
“If they could now assume consciousness and speech they might exclaim, ‘O blest and God-loved men who live at this day! What a happy age in the world’s history has fallen to your lot, you who plant and reap an inheritance of all good things which grow for you in ungrudging abundance! What rich harvests do you not gather in? What wealth from the plains, what innocent pleasures is it not in your power to reap from the rich vegetation surrounding you on all sides! You may indulge in luxurious food without staining your hands with innocent blood. While as for us wretches, our lot was cast in an age of the world the most savage and frightful conceivable. We were plunged into the midst of an all-prevailing and fatal want of the commonest necessaries of life from the period of the earth’s first genesis, while yet the gross atmosphere of the globe hid the cheerful heavens from view, while the stars were yet wrapped in a dense and gloomy mist of fiery vapours, and the sun [earth] itself had no firm and regular course. Our globe was then a savage and uncultivated wilderness, perpetually overwhelmed with the floods of the disorderly rivers, abounding in shapeless and impenetrable morasses and forests. Not for us the gathering in of domesticated fruits; no mechanical instrument of any kind wherewith to fight against nature. Famines gave us no time, nor could there be any periods of seed-time and harvest.
“‘What wonder, then, if, contrary to nature, we had recourse to the flesh of living beings, when all our other means of subsistence consisted in wild corn [or a sort of grass—ἄγρωστιν], and the bark of trees, and even slimy mud, and when we deemed ourselves fortunate to find some chance wild root or herb? When we tasted an acorn or beech-nut we danced with grateful joy around the tree, hailing it as our bounteous mother and nurse. Such was the gala-feast of those primeval days, when the whole earth was one universal scene of passion and violence, engendered by the struggle for the very means of existence.
“‘But what struggle for existence, or what goading madness has incited you to imbrue your hands in blood—you who have, we repeat, a superabundance of all the necessaries and comforts of existence? Why do you belie the Earth [τὶ καταψεύοεσθε τῆς Γῆς] as though it were unable to feed and nourish you? Why do you do despite to the bounteous [goddess] Ceres, and blaspheme the sweet and mellow gifts of Bacchus, as though you received not a sufficiency from them?
“‘Does it not shame you to mingle murder and blood with their beneficent fruits? Other carnivora you call savage and ferocious—lions and tigers and serpents—while yourselves come behind them in no species of barbarity. And yet for them murder is the only means of sustenance; whereas to you it is a superfluous luxury and crime.’
“For, in point of fact, we do not kill and eat lions and wolves, as we might do in self-defence—on the contrary, we leave them unmolested; and yet the innocent and the domesticated and helpless and unprovided with weapons of offence—these we hunt and kill, whom Nature seems to have brought into existence for their beauty and gracefulness....