Plutarch's "On Eating Flesh" — The Roman-Era Case Against Meat
What it is
Plutarch of Chaeronea (c. 46–120 CE) — biographer, moralist, priest of Apollo at Delphi, and one of the most widely read writers of the ancient world — wrote two surviving essays on vegetarianism, both known as "On Eating Flesh" (De Esu Carnium), that stand as the most rhetorically sophisticated and emotionally direct arguments against meat eating from the ancient world. They are not philosophical treatises in the technical sense; they are moral harangues, written with considerable passion, and they anticipate many of the arguments that contemporary animal advocates make by nearly two thousand years.
History & domestication
Plutarch was a Platonist who took Pythagoras seriously and engaged with the question of animal souls through a Platonic-Pythagorean framework. His "On Eating Flesh" essays, which survive only in partial form, were written sometime in the late 1st or early 2nd century CE. They are addressed to a general educated Roman audience — people for whom meat eating was entirely normal, who attended sacrificial feasts as part of civic and religious life, and who had probably never seriously considered that there was anything morally problematic about it.
Plutarch's rhetorical strategy is to defamiliarize meat eating — to make the reader see what they are actually doing when they eat flesh, as if for the first time. He begins with a famous provocation: "You ask me for what reason Pythagoras abstained from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both what was the feeling, and what reason or argument, that induced the first man who put his mouth to gore, and touched his lips to the flesh of a dead creature..." He then proceeds to describe the process of slaughter in visceral detail — the killing, the butchering, the cooking — and asks his reader to honestly consider whether the taste of meat is worth what it costs.
Cultural significance
Plutarch's essays are significant for several reasons. First, they were written by a man of the mainstream Roman educated class — not a philosophical sectarian or a religious ascetic, but a respected public intellectual and priest — which meant they could not be dismissed as eccentric. Second, they engage directly with the argument from pleasure: Plutarch does not deny that meat tastes good; he questions whether pleasure is sufficient justification for killing. Third, they contain some of the earliest explicit arguments about what we might now call animal cognition: Plutarch argues at length that animals possess reason, memory, social bonds, and something like virtue, and therefore cannot simply be treated as mere resources.
Religious & theological context
Plutarch was a priest of Apollo and took his religious duties seriously, which created a personal tension with mainstream Greek and Roman religious practice, in which animal sacrifice was central. He navigated this by distinguishing between the act of sacrifice (which was religiously required and which he did not publicly challenge) and the act of eating the sacrificed animal's flesh afterward (which was not required and which he questioned). This is a careful distinction — he was not attacking Greek religion, which would have been politically and personally dangerous; he was questioning what happened after the ritual act was complete.
Food uses & preparation
Plutarch's essays do not describe a cuisine; they argue against one. But they implicitly reveal what the educated Roman diet looked like: meat-centered, diverse (he mentions many species), and integrated into social and religious ritual in ways that made abstaining from it a visible act of dissent. The Pythagoreans in his era maintained their vegetarian communities, but Plutarch was arguing to people outside those communities — to the mainstream.
Ethical dimensions
Plutarch makes several ethical arguments that are strikingly modern:
1. The argument from unnecessary harm: We do not need meat to survive; we have abundant plant foods. Therefore, eating meat is unnecessary, and killing for what is unnecessary is unjust.
2. The argument from animal cognition: Animals are not machines. They have desires, fears, social relationships, and something that functions like reason. A being with these capacities is not merely a resource.
3. The argument from habituation and character: People who kill and eat animals become, over time, less sensitive to suffering and cruelty in general. The habit of callousness toward animals shapes the character in ways that make callousness toward other humans more likely. This is an argument not about animals but about what meat eating does to us.
4. The disgust argument: If we really thought meat was natural and good, why do we go to such lengths to disguise what it is? We marinate, season, cook, and garnish until what we eat no longer resembles what it was. This concealment, Plutarch suggests, is a form of moral bad faith.
The future
Plutarch is rarely cited in contemporary animal ethics debates, but he should be. His essays demonstrate that serious arguments against eating animals are not an invention of 20th-century philosophy or 21st-century environmentalism — they are as old as Western civilization's habit of self-examination. The specific arguments he makes — unnecessary harm, animal cognition, character corruption, disguised reality — all appear in contemporary form in the literature of animal ethics.
Reference notes
Cross-link to: Pythagoras and Western Vegetarianism, Porphyry on Vegetarianism, Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, Animal Cognition and Food Ethics. Tags: Philosophy > Ancient, Ethics > History.
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