Vegetarianism
It seems to be the case, from the limited material at our disposal, that the
“animal question” was pursued across the boundaries of religions and philo-
sophical schools and was seen as an entertaining subject to disagree on.
Sometimes, though, this subject had more serious subtexts. When animals
were discussed in relation to diet, things became more serious, since eating
is not a thing to be taken lightly.
The question of vegetarianism – abstention from eating flesh (to
sarkofagein) – is closely connected to the definition of animals and humans in
relation to each other. How one thought about animals and their status and
value clearly had consequences for how they were treated. Could animals be
eaten? Could they be sacrificed? The question of animal sacrifice in partic-
ular goes to the heart of ancient religion.
One of the main subjects of Porphyry’s treatise On Abstinence is the ques-
tion of a vegetarian diet. Together with Plutarch’s two works against eating
flesh, On Abstinence is the most vigorous defence of vegetarianism from the
ancient world. Porphyry’s solution to the problem of the relationship
between animal sacrifice and eating flesh is to say that even if animals are
sacrificed, it does not necessarily follow that they should be eaten (2.2). This
is a point to which Porphyry repeatedly returns (2.42, 2.53, 2.57; see also
Chapter 7).
A revival of Pythagoreanism in these centuries once again called attention
to a vegetarian lifestyle, as seen in Philostratus’ biographical novel about
Apollonius of Tyana. And while a vegetarian diet is especially associated
with Pythagoreanism, it also became, after Plato, part of the Academy
(Haussleiter 1935: 204ff; Tsekourakis 1987).
Vegetarianism often had a religious dimension and could be a mark of
religious affiliation. Seneca, for instance, put an end to his vegetarian
lifestyle because his father did not want him to be regarded as one who
participated in foreign cults (Epistle, 108). In several of the religions of the
empire, only certain animals, parts of animals or certain plants could be

to the Orphics in an argument about the eating of animal flesh, cannibalism
and reincarnation in his two small vegetarian texts (993A, 996B–C), which
are the two surviving ones of a whole series of discourses on the subject.
Plutarch’s position is rather one of modified support for the idea of reincar-
nation.
1
Perhaps the idea is true, and if it is, would anybody really take the
chance of eating meat if it could be their mother, brother or son reborn as an
animal (997D–E, 998D)? Thus Plutarch keeps open the possibility of such a
close connection between animals and humans as the idea of reincarnation
implies, but without wholeheartedly supporting it.
Reincarnation was not the only argument against slaughtering animals
and eating food made from their dead bodies. Seneca mentions that
Pythagoreans could have different reasons for abstaining from meat, but he
hastens to add that “it was in each case a noble reason” (Epistle, 108). One
reason for vegetarianism was that animals, like humans, had the capacity for
suffering. Therefore, out of compassion towards their fellow beings, humans
ought to treat animals well. In this case, a relationship between animals and
humans was clearly recognized. According to Plutarch, eating flesh may take
place because of hunger but never as a luxury (996F). The killing must be
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65
done “in pity and sorrow”, not by degrading and torturing the animal.
Plutarch also criticizes the fact that beasts are slain to fill the tables of the
rich, who seldom eat what has been put on the table: “more is left than has
been eaten. So the beasts died for nothing!” (994F).
This ethical vegetarianism often included an element of concern for
humans. “Who could wrong a human being when he found himself so gently
and humanely disposed towards other non-human creatures?” (Moralia,
996A) asks Plutarch. He argues that the killing of animals is part of a process

of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?
(On the Eating of Flesh, 993A–B)
This treatise has been characterized as a work of his youth and “on the
whole, rather immature beside the Gryllus and the De Sollertia Animalium,”
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66
and its rhetoric has been described as “exaggerated and calculated”
(Helmbold 1968: 537). Be that as it may, these treatises are interesting
because of their vigorous and varied arguments against eating meat.
Plutarch’s point of departure is the question of what reason Pythagoras had
for abstaining from flesh. Plutarch’s answer is that the man one should seek
out is not the one who abstains but the one who starts to eat animal flesh.
Plutarch’s point is that eating flesh is unnatural. Man is not a carnivorous
animal, and accordingly eating flesh is not appropriate for him. Another of
his points is that people are eating harmless tame creatures, not lions and
wolves (994B). Implicit is the argument that it is unjust to harm those who
do not harm humans. Plutarch compares the gain to men, a little flesh, with
the fact that animals are deprived of the life to which they are entitled.
However, the pollution of animal flesh is also evoked in the battle against
eating meat. It was conceived of as making humans spiritually gross,
although it made their bodies strong: “It is a fact that the Athenians used to
call us Boeotians beef-witted and insensitive and foolish precisely because we
stuffed ourselves” (995E) says Plutarch. To cultivate the brilliance of the
human soul, one must not burden the body with improper food:
When we examine the sun through dank atmosphere and a fog of
gross vapours, we do not see it clear and bright, but submerged
and misty, with elusive rays. In just the same way, then, when the
body is turbulent and surfeited and burdened with improper food,
the lustre and light of the soul inevitably come through it blurred
and confused, aberrant and inconstant, since the soul lacks the bril-

Porphyry, the souls of prophetic animals can be received into a person who
eats the heart of the animal (2.48). A prohibition against eating the heart
and brain of animals because they are ladders and seats of wisdom and life is
found among the Neoplatonists. It expresses a link between humans and
animals in terms of their mental capacities, even if it does not necessarily
mean a belief in transmigration. It also implies that it is undesirable to
develop this connection, because the animal soul is inferior. In other types of
prophecy, purity of soul and a vegetarian diet are explicitly required.
According to J. Haussleiter, the mantic motif was predominant in the vege-
tarian diet of Apollonius of Tyana and in his opposition to bloody sacrifices
(Haussleiter 1935: 308).
As we have seen, both a belief in a close relationship between animals and
humans and a wish to create a distance between them could lead to vegetari-
anism and abstention from eating meat. In both cases, abstinence from
animal food shows a concern for the categorical boundary between the
species. Both attitudes are often present in the same author – arguments
supporting the human-like qualities of animals as well as arguments against
the pollution inherent in their dead bodies. Plutarch, for instance, combines
a mixture of respect and compassion towards living beings with an abhor-
rence of eating flesh because it is disgusting and polluting (993B).
According to Plutarch, the eating of animal flesh is unnatural for man – it is
not according to nature (kata physin) (994F) but contrary to nature (para
physin) (993E, 996B).
All the same, and in spite of his highly rhetorical arguments against
eating meat, Plutarch does not oppose meat eating under all circumstances.
However, it is only permitted out of hunger and on the condition that the
animal has been killed in a humane way (996F).
The question of vegetarianism was mainly a question of how to relate to
tame animals. Greek authors made a clear distinction between tame animals
(hemeros) and wild animals (agrios). Latin authors made a similar distinction

Abstaining from fish, like abstaining from all types of meat, may have
several reasons and may in a similar way be based on the belief in a close
relationship between these creatures and humans, as well as in an experience
of distance and impurity. Plutarch also stresses here his general argument
against harming animals – never to harm those animals that do not harm
humans.
Like Plutarch, Porphyry finds that “those irrational animals that are
unjust and evil by nature” can be destroyed, but as for those animals that do
not naturally harm humans, it is unjust (adikos) to destroy and murder them
(2.22.2). Justice towards animals meant on this point treating them as they
treat us.
Putting a distance between humans and beasts of prey, like lions and
wolves, which themselves had a diet based on meat, was an issue. When
Seneca supports vegetarianism, he quotes his teacher Sotion, a Pythagorean,
who kept the question of transmigration open, saying: “I am merely depriving
you of food which sustains lions and vultures” (Epistle, 108). Plutarch points
out that if humans were meant to eat animals, their bodies would have been
equipped for killing them, with fangs and claws (995A–B).
The human relationship with animals that is reflected in vegetarian prac-
tices mainly encompasses tame animals and is more complicated than
Graeco-Roman attitudes towards wild animals. In vegetarianism, there is a
mingling of different attitudes towards animals – empathy as well as distance,
a naturalization of similarities as well as a wish to underline differences. This
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69
ambiguity was rather typical of several of the genres that in the ancient
world had animals as their subject. Natural history is a case in point.
Natural histories
The relations between animals and humans were not only a subject of philo-
sophical debate and vegetarian practice but also the focus of natural

Graeco-Roman authors of natural histories wrote about animals they had
seen as well as those they had never seen but believed they existed. Among
the many various animals that Pliny describes, he mentions camelopards
(giraffes) (Natural History, 8.27), first seen at games held by Julius Caesar,
but he also refers to the Scandinavian achlis, probably an elk or a reindeer, an
animal that had never appeared in Rome (Natural History, 8.16, 8.39; cf.
Zeuner 1963: 428). However, in parallel with these animals, Pliny also
describes fantastic and non-existent creatures such as Ethiopian sphinxes and
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70
pegasi (Natural History, 8.30), as well as the Indian unicorn and the basilisk
serpent of Cyrenaica (Natural History, 8.33), as if these animals were just as
real as the camelopard and the achlis.
A similar phenomenon is reflected in art. In the upper part of the
Palestrina mosaic from the second century
BCE, which presents in a vivid and
detailed way a general view of life in Egypt, forty kinds of animal are
depicted. Some of them do not live in Egypt, which may suggest that the
mosaic shows a contemporary zoological garden in Alexandria, as has
recently been suggested by archaeologist Gyözö Vörös (2001: 114). The
animals are labelled with Greek names, and although most of them can be
identified as real animals, such as the giraffe, lion and rhinoceros, at least
one of them seems to be a fabulous creature, the onokentaura, a female
human-headed ass. But even if the depiction of the onokentaura may be an
attempt to depict a gnu, as has been suggested (Meyboom 1995: 111–14),
its human head shows a confusion of categories that makes this animal
rather peculiar. In any case, the Palestrina mosaic is a picturesque illustra-
tion of the combination of well-known animals with lesser-known ones,
some of which are on the verge of being fabulous. Thus this mosaic illus-
trates in a way similar to the natural histories the blurring of the borderline

There are several examples of how the division between animals and
humans is ignored in radical ways, for instance in the many stories of rein-
carnation across species and, not least, in the stories of love and friendship
between a human and an animal. Pliny, as well as Oppian and Aelianus,
passed on many classical stories in which animal intelligence and goodness
were praised.
Oppian writes of dolphins that they had earlier been men and had “lived
in cities along with mortals” (1.649–50). He regards the hunting of
dolphins as immoral (5.416ff). Aelian (c. 170–230
CE), an Italian Sophist
and priest who lived in Praeneste, never left Italy but nevertheless wrote in
Greek and only quoted Greek authors, describes peculiarities of animal
behaviour, their names, habits and characteristics. In On the Characteristics of
Animals, a work in seventeen books, ethnographic reports are combined with
myths and fables in an odd mixture. Aelian writes of storks that when they
reach old age, they are transformed into human shape (he insists that it is no
fairytale! (3. 23)). He also reports that on the island of Diomeda, there are
birds that were originally Greeks and contemporaries of Diomedes (1.1).
Pliny is more sceptical; for instance, he does not believe that humans can
turn into werewolves (Natural History, 8.34). But stories about friendship
between humans and dolphins, as well as about dolphins that are helpful to
humans, which are commonplaces in natural histories, are also told by Pliny
(Natural History, 9.8–10).
In Aelian’s work, several anecdotes about cross-species love relationships
appear (Kindstrand 1998: 2964; cf. Salisbury 1994: 84–101). Humans are
paired with a dog, a horse, a dolphin and a serpent, but also with a ram and
a goose. Usually, the animal makes the first move (1.6, 2.6, 5.29, 6.15, 6.17;
cf. Natural History, 7.13–14), signalling, perhaps, that it is the human form
that is the object of the love and lust of the animal because the human form
is the highest of animate beings and therefore the most attractive. Aelian has

attitude based on Stoic-Cynic ideas, an attitude that was common in these
centuries (Kindstrand 1998: 2965, 2990).
There is a strong tendency to model animals on humans. Pliny, for
instance, draws a picture of elephants that makes them close to humans
(Natural History, 8.1–13). According to him, elephants are near to man in
intelligence. They understand human language, show reverence towards
heaven, form close friendships with each other and are reported to fall in
love with humans. It is also possible to teach elephants to do tricks, a token
of their capacity for intelligent learning.
But the ability of animals to learn tricks is a two-edged sword, because it
also makes them subordinate to humans and makes them recognize humans
as their masters. Pliny writes about an elephant that was scolded because of
its mediocre performance and because of that kept rehearsing during the
night to get its performance right (Natural History, 8.3). Is the dog cleverer
than the cat because it can learn tricks, or is the cat cleverer because it
refuses to do as humans tell it? When the “cleverness” of animals is
measured against a human ideal, it tends to turn animals into abortive
humans. In contrast to the way that, for instance, Alexander, Philo’s nephew,
mentioned the ability of animals to learn tricks as proof of their intelligence,
Augustine used performing animals as examples of animals’ subordination
to humans (Questions on Various Topics, 83).
While elephants resemble humans and may be taught tricks, other
animals are unaffected by humans and in some cases develop societies that
may appear as models for human societies. This perspective is most system-
atically exploited with regard to insects. Insects, especially bees and ants, are
frequently referred to and treated as models for humans. Pliny gives pride of
place to bees because they alone among insects “have been made for the sake
of man” (Natural History, 11.4). But an important reason why he admires
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73

received a Christian interpretation and became marvellous moral examples
for human life (Miller 2001: 61–73).
It is the wavering between different views of animals that is so fascinating
in the natural histories composed during the empire. They are constantly
moving back and forth between a conception of animals as merely beasts and
a conception of them as human, only with tails and fur, hooves or claws.
Physiognomics
A more systematic combination of similarities and differences between
animals and humans is found in the physiognomic tradition. Physiognomics
(physiognomonia) is the study of the relationship between the external form of
animals and humans and their inner characteristics. Animals are used as
examples and symbols. In ancient times, animals were believed to inherit
specific characteristics, and a species of animals could therefore appear as a
VEGETARIANISM, NATURAL HISTORY AND PHYSIOGNOMICS
74
symbol of these characteristics. Thus animals could be seen as representing a
human passion, a virtue or a vice. Physiognomics presupposed parallels in
the nature of animals and of humans and was built on a schematic and one-
dimensional view of animals.
According to a treatise assigned to Aristotle (but probably not written by
him but by one of his pupils), “no animal has ever existed such that it has
the form of one animal and the disposition of another, but the body and soul
of the same creature are always such that a given disposition must neces-
sarily follow a given form” (Physiognomics, 805a12–15). The principle of the
connection between bodily and mental characteristics was transferred to
humans. Pseudo-Aristotle says about one branch of physiognomists that
“they have supposed one type of body for the animal and then have
concluded that the man who has a body similar to this will have a similar
soul” (ibid., 805a22–4). Although the author of this treatise voices his scep-
ticism concerning partial and simplistic ways of using physiognomic

common in literature from classical times – in Homer, this type of compar-
ison is quite common. In later times, however, and especially in Galen, the
VEGETARIANISM, NATURAL HISTORY AND PHYSIOGNOMICS
75
parallels between animals and humans in nature and physique were
explained with recourse to the doctrine of humours and the relationship
between the different principles in the human body. This doctrine had
become a basic principle encompassing both animals and humans (Evans
1969: 17ff).
In spite of the fact that physiognomics was based on experience of a close
relationship between animals and humans, the way it was used in practice in
the Roman Empire was mainly as a means of demonstrating difference. To
achieve this goal, antitheses as well as homologies were employed. Humans
were opposed to beasts as men were to women and Greeks to barbarians. For
even if a man were to be compared to a lion in a laudatory way, animal paral-
lels were used most frequently to blame and abuse people. When male
Romans were described with animal characteristics, or for that matter
described as feminine or barbarian, this was not intended to boost these
men’s self-image or to heighten their standing in the eyes of their fellows.
Tamson S. Barton illustrates this point well by saying about Polemo that
rather “than actually making wax images of his opponents to burn, with
physiognomica he constructed their bodies so as to destroy their characters”
(Barton 1994: 97). Collective designations for animals were used in a
derogatory way in descriptions of humans. To be labelled a therion in Greek
or a belua or bestia in Latin was normally an insult.
5
It seems as if physiognomic thinking was rooted in experience of the
similarities between humans and animals, but it was to an increasing degree
being used to show up their differences. In the end, the last remainder of any
lingering similarity between animals and humans, which had been the orig-

Seneca as well as with Plutarch and Porphyry. Furthermore, Porphyry may
in his youth have defended the position that animals had reason, a position
he later abandoned. These changes in the attitudes of the authors who had
earlier written in defence of animals perhaps illustrate that such views were
contested and were somewhat marginal.
When the categorical boundaries between animals and humans were
debated in the first centuries
CE, it is reasonable to think that it had some-
thing to do with actual experience of animals. Animals were by some
experienced more than before as being different from humans. The institu-
tion of the arena could also have contributed to brutalizing people’s
attitudes towards animals.
Philosophy, vegetarianism, natural history and physiognomics
contributed to the general conception of animals. But while these fields
show that animals, with some significant exceptions, were predominantly
viewed as different from humans and at the lower end of the ontological
hierarchy, there were areas where thoughts and conceptions of animals took
more subtle directions. How were the beasts of the imagination cultivated in
these centuries of flourishing paganism and growing Christianity when such
imagined beasts really thrived in literature and art as well as in religion?
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