“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.