The Oldest Argument
Nae Vegan ShoesAsk a vegan why they don’t eat animals and you might hear about a documentary, a nutrition study or a report on farming. All of that is recent. The argument underneath it is not.
In Before the Word ‘Vegan’ Existed, we looked beyond Europe, at the traditions that reached a meal without animals long before the English word was coined. This time we go back to Greece and Rome, where poets and philosophers had already set out several of the ethical reasons we still give, and plenty of the objections too.
Many of those ancient arguments rest on a dualism of body and soul: the damage, pain or suffering we cause to a body, our own or another creature’s, leaves a stain on the soul. That does not mean there were no arguments on other grounds, but many of the most quoted, from the best-known figures, take this view.
An ‘Orphic life’
One of the oldest descriptions of a life without meat comes from Plato, who was not recommending it. In the Laws, written in the fourth century BCE and traditionally held to be his last work, a speaker from Athens recalls people who ‘did not even venture to taste the flesh of a cow’, and who offered their gods ‘only cakes and fruits dipped in honey’. Then he gives their way of life a name:
“For in those days men are said to have lived a sort of Orphic life, having the use of all lifeless things, but abstaining from all living things.”
Plato, Laws, Book VI, 782c, translated by Benjamin Jowett, in The Dialogues of Plato, vol. V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892)
The Orphics were a religious movement named after Orpheus, the singer of Greek myth. The reasons Plato reports are partly ours and partly not: these people thought they ‘ought not to eat’ animals, and also that they ‘might not stain the altars of the Gods with blood’. They also believed that souls are reborn, as punishment for a sin connected with bloodshed. But according to the classicist Alberto Bernabé, what kept them from meat was not, as with the Pythagoreans, a sense of kinship with animals: it was above all the refusal to shed blood. Either way, by Plato’s time this way of life already had a name, and it was old enough to be remembered as the way people lived ‘in those days’.
Pythagoras, as Ovid imagined him
Pythagoras, who lived from about 570 to 490 BCE, is the name most often attached to the argument and the one we know least about. He wrote nothing, and the earliest evidence about his views is, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, thin and contradictory: ancient sources disagree even about whether he gave up meat.
What we have is a portrait. Some five centuries later, the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) gave much of the last book of his Metamorphoses to a long speech by Pythagoras, whom he introduces as ‘the first man to forbid the use / of any animal’s flesh as human food’. ‘Do not permit / pollution of your bodies with such food,’ his Pythagoras pleads, when the earth offers grain, fruit and herbs. The ox gets the most moving lines:
“Why have the oxen of the field deserved / a sad end—innocent, without deceit, / and harmless, without guile, born to endure / hard labor?”
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 120–121, translated by Brookes More (Boston: Cornhill Publishing Co., 1922)
And the next time you sit down to beef, he warns, ‘know and feel / that you gnaw your fellow tillers of the soil’.
In 1700 the poet John Dryden translated the speech and gave it a couplet that has been quoted ever since: ‘Take not away the Life you cannot give: / For all Things have an equal right to live.’ It is a free rendering: the ‘equal right to live’ is Dryden’s, not Ovid’s. Each age retells the argument in its own words.
What we can say is that Orphism, Pythagoreanism and other movements and cults of the time were closely linked, both to one another and to cultures beyond the Greek world. Orpheus was said to come from Thrace, and Herodotus believed that the Egyptians had been the first to teach that the soul passes from one body to another. These movements shared a great deal, above all the transmigration of souls and the curse that follows the shedding of blood.
Plutarch turns the question round
A century or so after Ovid, the Greek writer Plutarch (c. 45–120 CE) was asked why Pythagoras had abstained from meat. His essay On the Eating of Flesh begins by turning the question round:
“I for my part do much admire in what humor, with what soul or reason, the first man with his mouth touched slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animal.”
Plutarch, On the Eating of Flesh, I (Moralia 993b), translated by William Baxter, revised by William W. Goodwin, in Plutarch’s Morals, vol. V (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874)
For Plutarch, the strange thing is not giving up meat but starting: serving up creatures ‘that but a little before lowed, cried, moved, and saw’. So he moves the burden of proof: ‘You ought rather, in my opinion, to have enquired who first began this practice, than who of late times left it off.’ Anyone who has been asked to justify a plate of lentils, while nobody asks the person opposite to justify their steak, will recognise the move. The usual defence of the habit is a petitio principii: it takes for granted the very thing it ought to prove.
He has a second challenge, for anyone who says humans were made to eat meat: ‘do you then yourself kill what you would eat. But do it yourself, without the help of a chopping-knife, mallet or axe’, the way wolves and lions do. Some seventeen centuries later, an English poet would repeat the challenge and name Plutarch as its source.
Seneca, who stopped and started again
The most human account comes from a Roman who tried it and went back. In Letter 108 to his friend Lucilius, the philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE) remembers his teacher Sotion, who explained to him why Pythagoras, and later the philosopher Sextius, had stopped eating meat. Sextius’s reasons sound strikingly modern: people had enough to live on without blood, and cruelty became a habit once tearing flesh became a pleasure.
Pythagoras’s reason was his belief that souls pass from body to body. Sotion did not ask Seneca to believe it, only to keep an open mind, and he offered him a wager:
“If these things be true it is innocence to abstain from living creatures: if they be false it is frugality.”
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 108, §21, translated by Thomas Lodge, in The Workes of Lucius Annæus Seneca (London: William Stansby, 1614), spelling modernised
And what would he lose? Only, said Sotion, ‘the meat of lions and vultures’. Seneca was persuaded: ‘I began to abstain from flesh, and ere a year was finished, the custom was not only easy unto me but pleasing. I thought my spirit more free than it was before.’ He adds, honestly, that he can no longer vouch for it.
Then he stopped. Early in the reign of Tiberius, foreign cults were being expelled from Rome, and avoiding certain meats was taken as a sign of belonging to one. His father, who in Seneca’s words ‘feared not reproach, but hated philosophy’, asked him to return to his old diet, and it was not hard, Seneca admits, to persuade him ‘to begin to sup better’.
It is not a heroic story, and that is what makes it useful. What brought Seneca back was not a better argument. It was politics, family and dinner.
Porphyry writes to a friend who went back
In the third century CE, the philosopher Porphyry (c. 234–305) heard that a friend had done the same, and wrote him four books about it:
“Hearing from some of our acquaintance, O Firmus, that you, having rejected a fleshless diet, have again returned to animal food, at first I did not credit the report.”
Porphyry, On Abstinence from Animal Food, Book I, §1, translated by Thomas Taylor, in Select Works of Porphyry (London: Thomas Rodd, 1823)
Four books is a long letter, and a fair one. Porphyry sets out his opponents’ best arguments before answering them, including the Epicurean case that justice is an agreement between those who can make agreements, which animals cannot. His reply, in the third book, rests on a claim about minds: any creature with sensation and memory has reason too, and so ‘we may extend, as our opponents will also admit, justice to every animal’.
If we owe justice even to the cruellest members of our own species, he asks, how can we owe none to ‘the ox that ploughs, the dog that is fed with us, and the animals that nourish us with their milk, and adorn our bodies with their wool’? The milk and the wool are a reminder that this is not veganism in our sense. But the idea that justice does not stop at the edge of our own species is already there.
Lucretius, who was arguing about something else
One more Roman poet belongs here, for a different reason. Lucretius, who wrote in the first century BCE, was an Epicurean, and nothing suggests he gave up meat. His poem On the Nature of Things sets out to explain the world through atoms. In the middle of an argument about how no two creatures are quite alike, he stops for a scene:
“Thus oft before fair temples of the gods, / Beside the incense-burning altars slain, / Drops down the yearling calf, from out its breast / Breathing warm streams of blood.”
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book II, lines 352–354, translated by William Ellery Leonard (London: J. M. Dent & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916)
The mother searches the pastures for her calf’s footprints and keeps going back to the stall. Fresh grass and the river cannot distract her, and no other calf will do: ‘So keen her search for something known and hers.’ Lucretius was making a point about physics. What stays with the reader is the cow.
It is literature’s other way of making the case: showing instead of arguing. Much later, it would become the main one.
What we inherited
Put together, these writers left us much of what we still say. Pity for the creature that ‘lowed, cried, moved, and saw’. The burden of proof, turned round by Plutarch. Justice beyond our own species, from Porphyry. Sotion’s wager, for anyone who isn’t sure. And Seneca’s honest account of how easy the change felt after a year, and of what brought him back.
