  THE years of the birth and death of the first of biographers and the most amiable of moralists are unknown. We learn from himself that he was studying philosophy at Athens under Ammonius, the Peripatetic, at the time when Nero was making his ridiculous progress through Greece. This was in 66 A.D., and the date of his birth may therefore be approximately placed somewhere about the year 40. He was thus a younger contemporary of Seneca. ChÆronea, in Boeotia, claims the honour of giving him birth. He lived several years at Rome and in other parts of Italy, where, according to the fashion of the age and the custom of the philosophic rhetoricians (of whom, probably, he was one of the very few whose prÆlections were of any real value), he gave public lectures, attended by the most eminent literary as well as social personages of the time, among whom were Tacitus, the younger Pliny, Quintilian, and perhaps Juvenal. These lectures may have formed the basis, if not the entire matter, of the miscellaneous essays which he afterwards published. When in Italy he neglected altogether the Latin language and literature, and the reason he gives proves the estimation in which he was held: “I had so many public commissions, and so many people came to me to receive instruction in philosophy.... it was, therefore, not till a late period in life that I began to read the Latin writers.” In fact, the very general indifference, or at least silence, of the Greek masters in regard to Latin literature is not a little remarkable. It is asserted, on doubtful authority (Suidas), that he was preceptor of Trajan, in the beginning of whose reign he held the high post of Procurator of Greece; and he also filled the honourable office of Archon, or Chief Magistrate of his native city, as well as of priest of the Delphic Apollo. He passed the later and larger portion of his life in quiet retirement at ChÆronea. The reason he assigns for clinging to that dull and decaying provincial town, although residence there was not a little inconvenient for him, is creditable to his citizen-feeling, since he believed that by quitting it he, as a person of influence, might contribute to its ruin. In all the relations of social life Plutarch appears to have been exemplary, and he was evidently held in high esteem by his fellow-citizens. As husband and father he was particularly admirable. The death of a young daughter, one of a numerous progeny, was the occasion of one of Plutarch’s writings are sufficiently numerous. The Parallel Lives, forty-six in number, in which he brings together a Greek and a Roman celebrity by way of comparison, is perhaps the book of Greek and Latin literature which has been the most widely read in all languages. “The reason of its popularity,” justly observes a writer in Dr. Smith’s Dictionary, “is that Plutarch has rightly conceived the business of a biographer—his biography is true portraiture. Other biography is often a dull, tedious enumeration of facts in the order of time, with perhaps a summing up of character at the end. The reflections of Plutarch are neither impertinent nor trifling; his sound good sense is always there; his honest purpose is transparent; his love of humanity warms the whole. His work is and will remain, in spite of all the fault that can be found with it by plodding collectors of facts and small critics, the book of those who can nobly think and dare and do.” His miscellaneous writings—indiscriminately classed under the title Moralia, or Morals, but including historical, antiquarian, literary, political, and religious disquisitions—are about eighty in number. As might be expected of so miscellaneous a collection, these essays are of various merit, and some of them are, doubtless, the product of other minds than Plutarch’s. Next to the Essay on Flesh Eating Plutarch was an especial admirer of Plato and his school, but he attached himself exclusively to no sect or system. He was essentially eclectic: he chose what his reason and conscience informed him to be the most good and useful from the various philosophies. As to the influence of his literary labours in instructing the world, it has been truly remarked by the author of the article in the Penny CyclopÆdia that, “a kind, humane disposition, and a love of everything that is ennobling and excellent, pervades his writings, and gives the reader the same kind of pleasure that he has in the company of an esteemed friend, whose singleness of heart appears in everything that he says or does.” His personal character is, in fact, exactly reflected in his publications. That he was somewhat superstitious and of a conservative bias is sufficiently apparent; The Lives has gone through numerous editions in all languages. Of the Morals, the first translation in this country was made by Philemon Holland, M.D., London, 1603 and 1657. The next English version was published in 1684–1694, “by several hands.” The fifth edition, “revised and corrected from the many errors of the former edition,” appeared in 1718. The latest English version is that of Professor Goodwin, of Harvard University (1870), with an introduction by R. W. Emerson. It is, for the most part, a reprint of the revision of 1718, and consists of five octavo volumes. It is a matter equally for In his Symposiacs, discussing (Quest. ii.), “whether the sea or land affords the better food,” and summing up the arguments, he proceeds:— “We can claim no great right over land animals which are nourished with the same food, inspire the same air, wash in and drink the same water that we do ourselves; and when they are slaughtered they make us ashamed of our work by their terrible cries; and then, again, by living amongst us they arrive at some degree of familiarity and intimacy with us. But sea creatures are altogether strangers to us, and are brought up, as it were, in another world. Neither does their voice, look, or any service they have done us plead for their life. This kind of animals are of no use at all to us, nor is there any obligation upon us that we should love them. The element we inhabit is a hell to them, and as soon as ever they enter upon it they die.” We may infer that Plutarch advanced gradually to the perfect knowledge of the truth, and it is probable that his essay on Flesh-eating was published at a comparatively late period in his life, since in some of his miscellaneous writings, in alluding to the subject, he speaks in less decided and emphatic terms of its barbarism and inhumanity: e.g., in his Rules for the Preservation of Health, while recommending moderation in eating, and professing abstinence from flesh, he does not so expressly denounce the prevalent practice. Yet he is sufficiently pronounced even here in favour of the reformed diet on the score of health:— “Ill-digestion,” says he, “is most to be feared after flesh-eating, for it very soon clogs us and leaves ill consequences behind it. It would be best to accustom oneself to eat no flesh at all, for the earth affords plenty enough of things fit not only for nourishment but for delight and enjoyment; some of which you may eat without much preparation, and others you may make pleasant by adding various other things.” That the non-Christian humanitarian of the first century was far ahead—we will not say of his contemporaries, but of the common crowd of writers and speakers of the present age in his estimate of the just rights and position of the innocent non-human races—will be sufficiently apparent from the following extract from his remarkable essay entitled, That the Lower Animals Reason, to which Montaigne seems to have been indebted. The essay is in the form of a dialogue between Odysseus (Ulysses) and Gryllus, who is one of the transformed captives of the sorceress Circe (see Odyssey ix.) Gryllus maintains the superiority “Being thus wicked and incontinent in inordinate desires, it is no less easy to be proved that men are more intemperate than other animals even in those things which are necessary—e.g., in eating and drinking—the pleasures of which we [the non-human races] always enjoy with some benefit to ourselves. But you, pursuing the pleasures of eating and drinking beyond the satisfaction of nature, are punished with many and lingering diseases Reprobating the harshness and inhumanity of Cato the Censor, who is usually regarded as the type of old Roman virtue, Plutarch, with his accustomed good feeling, declares:— “For my part, I cannot but charge his using his servants like so many horses and oxen, or turning them off or selling them when grown old, to the account of a mean and ungenerous spirit, which thinks that the sole tie between man and man is interest or necessity. But goodness moves in a larger sphere than [so-called] justice. The obligations of law and equity reach only to mankind, but kindness and beneficence should be extended to beings of every species. And these always flow from the breast of a well-natured man, as streams that flow from the living fountain. A good man will take care of his horses and dogs, not only while they are young, but when old and past service. Thus the people of Athens, when they had finished the temple of Hecatompedon, set at liberty the lower animals that had been chiefly employed in that work, suffering them to pasture at large, free from any further service.... We certainly ought not to treat living beings like shoes or household goods, which, when worn out with use, we throw away; and were it only to learn benevolence to human kind, we should be compassionate to other beings. For my own part, I would not sell even an old ox that had laboured for me; much less would I remove, for the sake of a little money, a man, grown old in my service, from his accustomed place—for to him, poor man, it would be as bad as banishment, since he could be of no more use to the buyer than he was to the seller. But Cato, as if he took a pride in these things, tells us that, when Consul, he left his war-horse in Spain, to save the public the charge of his freight. Whether such things as these are instances of greatness or of littleness of soul, let the reader judge for himself.” 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.’ “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 “‘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—????st??], 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 [t? ?ata?e??es?e t?? G??] 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.... “Nothing puts us out of countenance [d?s?pe?], not the charming beauty of their form, not the plaintive sweetness of their voice or cry, not their mental intelligence [pa??????a ?????], not the purity of their diet, not superiority of understanding. For the sake of a part of their flesh only, we deprive them of the glorious light of the sun—of the life for which they were born. The plaintive cries they utter we affect to take to be meaningless; whereas, in fact, they are entreaties and supplications and prayers addressed to us by each which say, ‘It is not the satisfaction of your real necessities we deprecate, but the wanton indulgence [????] of your appetites. Kill to eat, if you must or will, but do not slay me that you may feed luxuriously.’ “Alas for our savage inhumanity! It is a terrible thing to see the table of rich men decked out by those layers out of corpses [?e?????s???], the butchers and cooks: a still more terrible sight is the same table after the feast—for the wasted relics are even more than the consumption. These victims, then, have given up their lives uselessly. At other times, from mere niggardliness, the host will grudge to distribute his dishes, and yet he grudged not to deprive innocent beings of their existence! “Well, I have taken away the excuse of those who allege that they have the authority and sanction of Nature. For that man is not, by nature, carnivorous is proved, in the first place, by the external frame of his body—seeing that to none of the animals designed for living on flesh has the human body any resemblance. He has no curved beak, no sharp talons and claws, no pointed teeth, no intense power of stomach [?????a? e?t???a] or heat of blood which might help him to masticate “If, in spite of all this, you still affirm that you were intended by nature for such a diet, then, to begin with, kill yourself what you wish to eat—but do it yourself with your own natural weapons, without the use of butcher’s knife, or axe, or club. No; as the wolves and lions and bears themselves slay all they feed on, so, in like manner, do you kill the cow or ox with a gripe of your jaws, or the pig with your teeth, or a hare or a lamb by falling upon and rending them there and then. Having gone through all these preliminaries, then sit down to your repast. If, however, you wait until the living and intelligent existence be deprived of life, and if it would disgust you to have to rend out the heart and shed the life-blood of your victim, why, I ask, in the very face of Nature, and in despite of her, do you feed on beings endowed with sentient life? But more than this—not even, after your victims have been killed, will you eat them just as they are from the slaughter-house. You boil, roast, and altogether metamorphose them by fire and condiments. You entirely alter and disguise the murdered animal by the use of ten thousand sweet herbs and spices, that your natural taste may be deceived and be prepared to take the unnatural food. A proper and witty rebuke was that of the Spartan who bought a fish and gave it to his cook to dress. When the latter asked for butter, and olive oil, and vinegar, he replied, ‘Why, if I had all these things, I should not have bought the fish!’ “To such a degree do we make luxuries of bloodshed, that we call flesh ‘a delicacy,’ and forthwith require delicate sauces [????] for this same flesh-meat, and mix together oil and wine and honey and pickle and vinegar with all the spices of Syria and Arabia—for all the world as though we were embalming a human corpse. After all these heterogeneous matters have been mixed and dissolved and, in a manner, corrupted, it is for the stomach, forsooth, to masticate and assimilate them—if it can. And though this may be, for the time, accomplished, the natural sequence is a variety of diseases, produced by imperfect digestion and repletion. “Diogenes (the Cynic) had the courage, on one occasion, to swallow a polypus without any cooking preparation, to dispense with the time and trouble expended in the kitchen. In the presence of a numerous concourse of priests and others, unwrapping the morsel from his tattered cloak, and putting it to his lips, ‘For your sakes,’ cried he, ‘I perform this extravagant action and incur this danger.’ A self-sacrifice truly meritorious! Not like Pelopidas, for the freedom of Thebes, or like Harmodius and Aristogeiton, on behalf of the citizens of Athens, did the philosopher submit to this hazardous experiments; for he acted thus that he might unbarbarise, if possible, the life of human kind. “Flesh-eating is not unnatural to our physical constitution only. The mind and intellect are made gross by gorging and repletion; for flesh-meat and wine may possibly tend to give robustness to the body, but it gives only feebleness to the mind. Not to incur the resentment of the prize-fighters [the athletes], I will avail myself of examples nearer home. The wits of Athens, it is well known, bestow on us Boeotians the epithets ‘gross,’ ‘dull-brained,’ and ‘stupid,’ chiefly on account of our gross feeding. We are even called ‘hogs.’ Menander nicknames us the ‘jaw-people’ [?? ??????? ????te?]. Pindar has it that “Besides and beyond all these reasons, does it not seem admirable to foster habits of philanthropy? Who that is so kindly and gently disposed towards beings of another species would ever be inclined to do injury to his own kind? I remember in conversation hearing, as a saying of Xenokrates, that the Athenians imposed a penalty upon a man for flaying a sheep alive, and he who tortures a living being is little worse (it seems to me) than he who needlessly deprives of life and murders outright. We have, it appears, clearer perceptions of what is contrary to propriety and custom than of what is contrary to nature.... “Reason proves both by our thoughts and our desires that we are (comparatively) new to the reeking feasts [???a] of kreophagy. Yet it is hard, as says Cato, to argue with stomachs since they have no ears; and the inebriating potion of Custom “In slaughtering swine, for example, they thrust red-hot irons into their living bodies, so that, by sucking up or diffusing the blood, they may render the flesh soft and tender. Some butchers jump upon or kick the udders of pregnant sows, that by mingling the blood and milk and matter of the embryos that have been murdered together in the very pangs of parturition, they may enjoy the pleasure of feeding upon unnaturally and highly inflamed flesh! Among the illustrious earlier contemporaries of Plutarch who practised no less than preached rigid abstinence, Apollonius of Tyana, the Pythagorean, one of the most extraordinary men of any age, deserves particular notice. He came into the world in the same year with the founder of Christianity, B.C. 4. The facts and fictions of his life we owe to Philostratus, who wrote his memoirs at the express desire of the Empress Julia Domna, the wife of Severus. Apollonius, according to his biographer, came of noble ancestry. He early applied himself to severe study at the ever memorable Tarsus, where he may have known the great persecutor, and afterwards second founder, of Christianity. Disgusted with the luxury of the people, he soon exiled himself to a more congenial atmosphere, and applied himself to the examination of the various schools of philosophy—the Epicurean, the Stoic, the Peripatetic, &c.—finally giving the preference to the Pythagorean. He embraced the strictest ascetic life, and travelled extensively, visiting, in the first instance, Nineveh, Babylon, and, it is said, India, and afterwards Greece, Italy, Spain, and Roman Africa and Ethiopia. At the accession of Domitian, he narrowly escaped from the hands of that tyrant, after having voluntarily given himself up to his tribunal, by an exertion of his reputed supernatural power. He passed the last years of his life at Ephesus, where, according to the well-known story, he is said to have announced the death of Domitian at the very moment of the event at Rome. His alleged miracles were so celebrated, and so curiously resemble the Christian miracles, that they have excited an unusual amount of attention. Unfortunately, the life by Philostratus, in accordance with the taste of a necessarily uncritical age, is so full of the preternatural and marvellous that the real fact that the pythagorean philosopher had acquired and possessed extraordinary mental as well as moral faculties, which might well be deemed supernatural at that period, is too apt to be discredited. The Life was composed long after the death of the hero, and thus a considerable amount of inventive license was possible to the biographer; but that it rested upon an undoubted substratum of actual occurrences will scarcely be disputed. There is one passage which deserves to be transcribed as of wider application. The people of a town in Pamphylia (in the Lesser Asia), where the great Thaumaturgist chanced to be staying, were starving in the midst of plenty by the selfish policy of the monopolists of grain, and, driven to desperation, were on the point of attacking the responsible authorities. Apollonius, at this crisis, wrote the following address, and gave it to the magistrates to read aloud:— “Apollonius to the Monopolists of Corn in Aspendos, greeting: The Earth is the common mother of all, for she is just. Philostratus assures us that “intimidated by these indignant words they filled the market with grain, and the city recovered from its distress.” |
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