Pythagoras and the First Western Vegetarianism
What it is
Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570–495 BCE) is the earliest documented Western philosopher to advocate abstaining from meat — so much so that for nearly two thousand years after his death, vegetarianism in the European world was simply called "the Pythagorean diet." His position was not a dietary preference in the modern sense. It was inseparable from a complete cosmological system, a theory of the soul, and a set of ritual obligations that bound the living to the dead, the human to the animal, and the present moment to an endless cycle of becoming.
History & domestication
Pythagoras founded a philosophical brotherhood at Croton, in what is now southern Italy, sometime around 530 BCE. The community followed strict communal rules covering diet, dress, ritual purification, and silence. The dietary core was the avoidance of meat — particularly of certain animals — and also, famously, of beans. The reasons Pythagoras gave for avoiding beans are a matter of scholarly debate that has not been settled in 2,500 years; proposed explanations range from the mystical (beans were believed to contain the souls of the dead) to the gastrointestinal to the political (bean-counting was used in Athenian democratic voting, so beans represented civic corruption the Pythagoreans rejected).
The meat prohibition rested on much firmer philosophical ground. Pythagoras taught metempsychosis — the transmigration of souls — which held that the soul is immortal and cycles through many bodies over time, human and animal alike. To kill and eat an animal was, potentially, to kill and eat someone you had once known, or might become. The Pythagorean Xenophanes reports the story — possibly apocryphal but philosophically significant — that Pythagoras once stopped a man from beating a dog because he recognized the soul of a deceased friend in the animal's cries. The story may be legend, but the doctrine it encodes is real: the boundary between human and animal souls was, for Pythagoras, permeable and morally consequential.
The Pythagorean community did not survive his death as an organized body, but his ideas passed into the mainstream of Greek philosophical life. Plato absorbed elements of metempsychosis into his own framework. The Neoplatonists — Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus — took up vegetarianism with particular seriousness. Porphyry of Tyre (234–305 CE) wrote On Abstinence from Animal Food, one of the most sustained philosophical arguments for vegetarianism before the modern era, drawing on Pythagorean principles alongside Platonic metaphysics and Stoic natural philosophy.
Cultural significance
Pythagorean vegetarianism had an enormous downstream influence precisely because it was grounded in a theory of what the soul is and what its relationship to animal life is — not merely in sentiment or revulsion at cruelty. It set a pattern that recurs throughout the Western philosophical tradition: the strongest ethical arguments against eating animals are those that force a reckoning with what we believe animals fundamentally are, not just how we feel about their suffering. When Peter Singer argues from sentience and Tom Regan argues from being a "subject of a life," they are working in a tradition that Pythagoras inaugurated: the tradition of asking what kind of being an animal is before deciding what kind of treatment it deserves.
The specific doctrine of metempsychosis also created an early, philosophically serious statement of what might be called "moral uncertainty across species." If you are not sure whether the animal before you contains a soul with a history and a future, how much certainty do you need before you are willing to kill it? This question, posed in cosmological terms by Pythagoras, recurs in contemporary animal ethics in more secular language: given uncertainty about the depth of animal consciousness, how should that uncertainty affect our behavior?
Religious & theological context
Pythagorean vegetarianism was itself a religious practice — it was embedded in a system of ritual purity, reincarnation theology, and community observance that functioned more like a mystery religion than a philosophy seminar. But it existed in tension with the dominant Greek religious practice of animal sacrifice, which was central to civic and household religion throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Sacrifice required killing; the Pythagoreans rejected killing. This was not a minor disagreement about diet but a fundamental challenge to the way Greek religion organized the human relationship to the divine through the slaughter and shared consumption of animals.
Food uses & preparation
Pythagoreans ate grains, legumes (except beans), vegetables, fruit, and dairy — a diet that looks, from a contemporary perspective, remarkably close to a lacto-vegetarian whole-foods diet. Honey was permitted. Fish was a complex question; some ancient sources suggest fish were avoided alongside meat, though other sources indicate that fish were sometimes permitted. The prohibition on beans was absolute, whatever its ultimate justification. This diet was practiced not as an aesthetic preference but as a form of spiritual discipline, and eating the wrong thing was understood as a form of moral pollution.
Ethical dimensions
The Pythagorean position anticipated almost every major thread in modern animal ethics. It argued that the boundary between human and animal is morally significant but permeable. It grounded the prohibition on killing in a theory of what the inner life of the animal is, not just in squeamishness about pain. It recognized that dietary choices are not merely personal preferences but cosmological commitments. And it created a community of practice around its ethical conclusions — not just a philosophical argument but a way of life.
The limits of the Pythagorean position are also instructive. It depended on a specific metaphysical claim — metempsychosis — that most people, then and now, do not accept. When that metaphysical foundation is removed, what remains? This is the challenge that modern secular animal ethics has tried to meet: how to ground the moral consideration of animals on reasons that do not require accepting a particular cosmology.
The future
Pythagorean vegetarianism as a living practice is not a significant movement today, but Pythagorean influence is everywhere in the ethics of eating animals. The philosophical move he pioneered — take seriously the question of what the animal is before deciding how to treat it — remains the decisive move in every serious contemporary argument about animal ethics. The specific cosmological content has changed; the structural form of the argument has not.
Reference notes
Cross-link to: Jain Dietary Traditions, Buddhist Vegetarianism, Porphyry and Ancient Vegetarian Philosophy, Peter Singer and Utilitarian Animal Ethics, Tom Regan and Animal Rights, the history of vegetarianism as a cultural practice. Related cuisines: ancient Mediterranean, contemporary plant-based. Suggested tag: Philosophy > Ancient.
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