“the end of the loin,
The gall, the bones uneatable, they give
Alone to Heaven: the rest themselves consume.”
“If, in fact,” remarks Clement, “the savour is the special desire of the Gods of the Greeks, should they not first deify the cooks, and worship the Chimney itself which is still closer to the much-prized savour?”
“If,” he justly adds, “the deity need nothing, what need has he of food? Now, if nourishing matters taken in by the nostrils are diviner than those taken in by the mouth, yet they imply respiration. What then do they say of God? Does He exhale, like the oaks, or does he only inhale, like the aquatic animals by the dilatation of the gills, or does he breathe all around like the insects?”
The only innocent altar he asserts to be the one allowed by Pythagoras:—
“The very ancient altar in Delos was celebrated for its purity, to which alone, as being undefiled by slaughter and death, they say that Pythagoras would permit approach. And will they not believe us when we say that the righteous soul is the truly sacred altar? But I believe that sacrifices were invented by men to be a pretext for eating flesh, and yet, without such idolatry, they might have partaken of it.”
He next glances at the popular reason for the Pythagorean abstinence, and declares:—
“If any righteous man does not burden his soul by the eating of flesh, he has the advantage of a rational motive, not, as Pythagoras and his followers dream, of the transmigration of the soul. Now Xenokrates, treating of ‘Food derived from Animals,’[72] and Polemon in his work ‘On Life according to Nature,’[72] seem clearly to affirm that animal food is unwholesome. If it be said that the lower animals were assigned to man—and we partly admit it—yet it was not entirely for food; nor were all animals, but such as do not work. And so the comic poet, Plato, says not badly in the drama of The Feasts:—