Plutarch's "On the Eating of Flesh"

We have already seen in a previous post that the ancient historian Plutarch, a Platonist philosopher and initiated priest of Delphi, explained why the priests of Isis abstained from eating the flesh of various animals, as well abstaining from wearing clothing made from animal matter including wool.  

The Plutarch passage discussed previously came from his discourse on Isis and Osiris.  However, Plutarch also wrote two other more thorough discussions of the question of abstaining from the eating of meat, entitled De Esu Carnium, ("On the Eating of Flesh").  Both are fragmentary, meaning that the complete text as composed by the author has been lost to history, but what remains contains some rather forceful argument against the consumption of the meat of animals.

Here is a link to the first discourse: Plutarch,  On the Eating of Flesh, I.

Here is a link to the second: Plutarch,  On the Eating of Flesh, II.

The discourses begin with a series of questions from the author loaded with graphic language and packing quite a punch:

Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man who did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? 

Later, Plutarch turns his rhetoric up another notch by imagining the reproach that the animals slaughtered for food might offer, if they "could recover feelings and voice," telling those who killed them for food that it was all unnecessary:

Oh blessed and beloved of the gods, you who live now, what an age has fallen to your lot wherein you enjoy and assimilate a heritage abounding in good things! How many plants grow for you! What vintages you gather! What wealth you may draw from the plains and what pleasant sustenance from trees! Why, you may even live luxuriously without the stain of blood.  [. . .] But you who live now, what madness, what frenzy drives you to the pollution of shedding blood, you who have such a superfluity of necessities? Why slander the earth by implying that she cannot support you? Why impiously offend law-giving Demeter and bring shame upon Dionysus, lord of the cultivated vine, the gracious one, as if you did not receive enough from their hands? Are you not ashamed to mingle domestic crops with blood and gore? You call serpents and panthers and lions savage, but you yourselves, by your own foul slaughters, leave them no room to outdo you in cruelty; for their slaughter is their living, yours is a mere appetizer.

In the second discourse on the subject, Plutarch brings up the doctrine of reincarnation, noting other philosophers who make this their main reason for avoiding the consumption of animals for food.  He does not go that far, he says, saying that there is room for doubt about whether souls do in fact "migrate from body to body."  However, he says that because there is enough doubt on either side of the reincarnation question, we should abstain from eating animals just in case, just as a soldier who is unsure whether or not a half-seen figure is friend or foe should err on the side of caution rather than risk killing a friend, saying:

Yet even if the argument of the migration of souls from body to body is not demonstrated to the point of complete belief, there is enough doubt to make us quite cautious and fearful. It is as though in a clash of armies by night you had drawn your sword and were rushing at a man whose fallen body was hidden by his armour and should hear someone remarking that he wasn't quite sure, but that he thought and believed that the prostrate figure was that of your son or brother or father or tent-mate — which would be the better course: to approve a false suspicion and spare your enemy as your friend, or to disregard an uncertain authority and kill your friend as your foe? The latter course you will declare to be shocking. 

This argument may strike modern readers as one that they can safely ignore, especially if they believe that "souls" do not really exist, or cannot survive the death of the body.  However, Chris Carter's excellent and important book Science and the Afterlife Experience contains reports of rather rigorous modern examinations of the question of reincarnation, and some evidence that the possibility should not be hastily dismissed.  

In that book, Chris Carter notes the widespread belief in reincarnation outside of cultures that have historically been heavily influenced by orthodox Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and also points out that:

at least some Christians believed in reincarnation up until the sixth century.  Although it was not part of official instruction, leaders of the church appear to have tolerated the belief as acceptable, until the Council of Nice in 553 CE. 

and in a footnote to this discussion, Chris Carter points out the following:

there are at least two references to reincarnation in the New Testament.  At one point the disciples ask Jesus if a blind man sinned in a previous life, and Jesus did not rebuke them (John 9:1-2); at another point Jesus describes John the Baptist as the prophet Elijah reborn (Matthew 11:11-15).  18-19 and footnote on 19.

However, it is likely that the disappearance of the doctrine of reincarnation discussed above is connected to the historic decline in vegetarian practice in some parts of the world, as well as the continuation of the practice of vegetarianism among at least some parts of the population in parts of the world that continued to believe in reincarnation (including areas to the east of the lands conquered by the Roman Empire, such as India, Tibet, and China).  

The fact that vegetarianism clearly had some very strong advocates in the west in ancient times and that the practice continued in other parts of the world (such as the lands to the east) may be an important clue, and it may tell us that the most ancient cultures around the world, including apparently the priests of ancient Egypt, taught abstinence from eating meat.  

As Plutarch says at the beginning of his discourses (and I paraphrase), the question might not be "when did vegetarianism begin?" but rather, "When and why was that teaching discarded, and the eating of meat initiated?"

Thoughts on the movie The Eagle (2011)

Released earlier this year, The Eagle tells the story of a young Roman commander's quest to recover the eagle lost by his father's legion during a defeat in northern Britain twenty years before at the hands of fierce Celtic tribesmen.

Based on the historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe, published in 1954, the movie does a fine job of portraying the dynamics of military command, especially the tension every new leader feels in his first command, when his orders are being warily evaluated by the unit and they are weighing what kind of a commander he will be. The movie also brings to life the "atmospheric" feel of the Roman outpost, the windswept hills of the Roman frontier, and the swampy forests pregnant with the potential for ambush at any moment.

The film takes place around the year AD 140, twenty years after the loss of the legion that is purported to have been the impetus for the construction of Hadrian's Wall, which was begun in AD 122. During this time period, the "Persian Mysteries" had become the dominant religious cult among the Roman legions, and the movie conveys the hero's faith in Mithras, even featuring a small image of a tauroctony among his personal items (for more on the Mithraic mysteries, see this previous post).

In all, the film does an admirable job of immersing the viewer in the period of the Roman Empire in a different part of the world than is usually portrayed in epic films set in ancient times. The viewer gains a gut feel for the central aspect of the Roman approach to battle, in which the primacy of the organization over the individual was supreme. The contrast to the approach of the Celts, in which the initiative and importance of the individual was primary, is stark -- never more so than when the Celtic Esca asks the Roman Aquila (in the trailer clip above), "How can a piece of metal mean so much to you?"*

A modern analogy might be the difference between the style of play of college basketball in the US (in which teams that follow rigorous drills and play as a single unit are much more common) and the style of play in the NBA (in which the initiative of individual players is often much more central to the offense). These are of course gross generalizations, but may provide a helpful insight into the tension between the culture of the Celts and the culture of Rome and what each valued most highly.

It was an important diametric opposition, and one that has played itself out in many aspects of western culture since the second century setting of The Eagle, and one which in fact continues to this day. Even in the United States, where the rights of the individual are privileged to a degree rarely found anywhere else or at any other time, the tension between what we might call "the Roman" and "the Celtic" turns up in many aspects of life and many of the great questions of our time.

The Celtic warriors of the movie are portrayed as typical "noble savages" -- proud, heroic, ferocious in battle, deeply spiritual, and wanting only to be left alone by the invaders who are despoiling their homelands and destroying their way of life. During the movie at critical points, the soundtrack features beautiful and mysterious Celtic song or chant, adding to the atmospheric elements that are one of the movie's greatest strengths (for more on the importance of chanting and song, see this previous post).

However, this portrayal of the Celts emphasizes only one side of their culture. By all accounts (including the accounts of the Romans, who greatly admired their bravery), the ancient Celts, including those in Britain, were in fact proud, heroic, ferocious in battle, and deeply spiritual. However, they were also learned and technologically advanced -- in some ways, more than the Romans (who defeated the Celts by virtue of their unmatched ability to forge military units that functioned like precision machines, rather than because of superior technology). In his description of the Celts in the region that is today France, Julius Caesar wrote that the Gauls (as they were also called) and in particular their Druids were extremely learned, not only about "the heavenly bodies and their movements" but also about the "size of the universe and the earth" (see the discussion and quotation from Caesar's Gallic Wars in this previous post).

Additionally, Caesar makes clear that the Celts were able to construct enormous and beautiful swan-ships which were superior to the ships of the Romans in every way -- the Romans could only defeat them in battle by destroying their masts and dropping gangplanks onto their ships so that the Roman soldiers could march aboard and defeat the Celts with army tactics rather than with naval tactics (the nautical capability of the ancient Celts is discussed in more detail in the Mathisen Corollary book). The level of civilization required to create ships of the type that awed Caesar is never portrayed in movie versions of the Celts that the Romans faced.

Finally, the Celts are depicted as basically pagan in the film, just as they are depicted in most other modern fiction. In fact, there is some historical evidence that many Celts of the British Isles adopted Christianity at a very early period -- according to some ancient sources, within the first century AD.

It is quite clear that the Apostle Paul evangelized among the Galatians: Gauls or Celts who had settled in Asia Minor after being brought in as mercenary fighters centuries earlier. Some authors believe that these Gauls may have spread their faith through western Europe and even the British isles when Roman pressure on them increased in Galatia and some of them returned westward along the fringes of the Empire.

Other ancient authors actually maintain that Paul himself went to Britain, and that the Aristobulus whom he mentions in Romans 16:10 was a bishop of Britain. This assertion was made by Dorotheus of Tyre (AD 255 - 362). Dorotheus also maintains that Simon the Zealot, one of the original Twelve Apostles mentioned in the Gospels, was martyred in Britain.

Medieval legends assert that Joseph of Arimathea actually spread Christianity to Britain even before the arrival of apostles and other missionaries. The ancient support for this assertion is somewhat lacking. Nevertheless, it does appear quite likely that the Celts of Britain and the Continent were exposed to Christianity quite early. Tertullian, who lived from AD 155 - 222, declared: "The extremities of Spain, the various parts of Gaul, the regions of Britain which have never been penetrated by Roman arms have received the religion of Christ."

While modern critics might argue that Tertullian, as a Christian theologian, had a motive in advertising the success his faith had achieved among even the most ferocious enemies of Rome, the fact that he lived at a period very close to that shown in The Eagle argues that his readers and listeners would have been aware that violent conflict was still going on between Celts and Romans, and that he would have had a difficult time passing off such a bold statement among other learned readers if it were not at least partly grounded in the truth.

The Eagle certainly does not treat the Romans as the unequivocal "good guys" in the film, and shows real sympathy to the virtues of the Celts, much the way modern Westerns often depict the American Indians in the face of an unstoppable if morally debased encroaching civilization. It is therefore probably not surprising that the movie basically imagines the Celts as Britannic versions of the Native Americans depicted in the movie versions of Last of the Mohicans or Dances With Wolves. We should be careful, however, not to project the events of the nineteenth century in North America, where one side did have vastly different and superior technology, onto the conflict between the Celts and the Romans, in which the technological differences may actually have been tilted the other way.

Nevertheless, The Eagle is a worthwhile film. Seeing good actors dramatizing the struggles of the individuals who lived in the ancient world can bring us closer to those ancient civilizations than can simply reading about them in books.




* The name of the protagonist Aquila, as summer stargazers in the Northern Hemisphere know, is Latin for "eagle," which gives us a fairly obvious play on words in the title of both the movie and the book and causes us to ask ourselves, "Is the movie about 'The Eagle' as in 'the standard of the legion that was lost and that Aquila seeks to recover,' or is the movie about 'The Eagle' as in 'Aquila himself'?" Ultimately, of course, the answer is the second, and the movie succeeds because of it.