Plutarch of Chaeronea lived between approximately 46 and 120 AD, spending his life in Boeotia and Athens, and later serving as a priest of Apollo at Delphi. Best known for his historical biographies and the essays gathered in the Moralia, he composed three surviving works that examine the moral status of animals and the practice of eating meat. In the Greco-Roman world, meat consumption was deeply connected to civic and religious institutions. Animal sacrifice formed the basis of public worship, operating as a communal covenant between citizens and their deities. Refusing sacrificial meat implied an exclusion from civic life and was frequently treated with suspicion. In the Roman context, the killing of animals also formed a central component of public entertainment. Under Emperor Titus, nine thousand beasts died during the games dedicating the Colosseum in 80 AD, and Trajan oversaw the slaughter of eleven thousand animals following his Dacian campaigns. These arena spectacles demonstrated imperial power and reinforced an established cosmic order that placed human beings between the gods and the natural world.
Dietary abstinence from meat remained an uncommon and countercultural practice in antiquity. Earlier philosophers, including Plato, Theophrastus, and Pythagoras, had advanced arguments in favor of a meatless regimen. The Pythagorean school emphasized the benefits of a plant-based diet for physical health, warned against the brutalizing effect of slaughter on human character, and taught the doctrine of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls between human and animal bodies. Plutarch drew upon these earlier traditions, but his perspective departed from them in a notable way. Most earlier Greek arguments against meat-eating were anthropocentric, focusing on how dietary choices affected the human mind, soul, or body. Plutarch maintained those arguments while introducing a direct concern for the suffering and sentience of the animals themselves.
In the first of these texts, Whether Land or Sea Animals are Cleverer, Plutarch presents a dialogue concerning whether terrestrial or aquatic species display greater intelligence. The discussion opens with an exchange about hunting, led by Plutarch’s father, Autobulus. Autobulus argues that the practice of hunting originally encouraged human cruelty. He compares the process to an Athenian execution that led to widespread state violence, arguing that hunting began as self-defense against dangerous predators and subsequently degraded into the routine slaughter of harmless domestic working animals. The text directly challenges the Stoic school, which denied rationality to animals and categorized them solely as resources for human use. Autobulus responds that rationality exists across a spectrum rather than as an absolute division. He argues that animals demonstrate practical reason by laying traps, finding shelter, and providing care for their young, a parental instinct that the Stoics themselves viewed as the origin of justice. The essay also acknowledges that humans may enter into functional relationships with animals, exchanging care and sustenance for manual labor, but insists that this arrangement does not justify unnecessary cruelty. Although the text ends without settling the debate between land and sea creatures, it establishes that nonhuman animals possess cognitive faculties that warrant moral consideration.
Plutarch approached the subject through literary dialogue in Beasts are Rational, also referred to as Gryllus. Drawing upon the narrative of Homer’s Odyssey, the work depicts a conversation between Odysseus and a former crew member named Gryllus, whom the sorceress Circe transformed into a pig. Gryllus rejects Odysseus’s offer to restore him to human form, arguing that animals lead lives of greater natural virtue than human beings. According to Gryllus, animal courage is direct and uncorrupted by fear of disgrace or calculated ambition, whereas human bravery must be manufactured through legal punishment and civic training. Gryllus further points out that nonhuman animals avoid artificial luxuries, wealth, and unnatural desires. They consume only what their physical nature requires and engage in mating solely for reproduction within their species. By contrast, Gryllus presents humans as omnivorous beings corrupted by luxury and endless appetite, consuming all living things to satisfy culinary greed.
The most sustained argument against meat-eating appears in Plutarch’s essay On the Eating of Flesh, a work preserved in two fragmentary sections from the author’s youth. Rather than asking why thinkers like Pythagoras avoided meat, Plutarch reverses the question, asking how the first human could tolerate the sight, odor, and texture of slaughtered corpses presented as food. The text emphasizes the physical realities of the abattoir, including the distress cries of animals facing death and the visceral revulsion of butchery. Plutarch describes extreme kitchen practices of his era, such as forcing heated iron skewers into the throats of pigs to alter the consistency of their blood or trampling pregnant sows to produce culinary novelties. He also advances an anatomical argument, observing that human teeth, nails, and digestive systems lack the biological equipment of true carnivores. Because humans cannot easily process raw meat, they must cook it and apply seasonings to mask its nature. Plutarch challenges meat-eaters to kill animals with their bare hands and consume the flesh raw while the animal is still alive if they believe such a diet is truly natural to their physiology.
Toward the close of the essay, Plutarch combines this concern for animal suffering with traditional philosophical reasoning. He notes that consuming meat harms the clarity of the human mind and soul, while cruelty toward beasts desensitizes people to acts of interpersonal violence. He also introduces the Pythagorean concept of reincarnation, arguing that the possibility of harming a body inhabited by a human soul demands moral restraint. Throughout these writings, Plutarch directly confronted the prevailing Stoic view of animals as unreasoning objects created for human consumption. In a society where animal sacrifice, arena slaughter, and social hierarchies were foundational, an ethical argument based on the intelligence and pain of animals occupied a marginal position. Plutarch’s texts nevertheless represent a distinct ancient effort to expand ethical responsibility beyond human boundaries, articulating principles that remain relevant within the broader history of vegetarian thought.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: Eating and Believing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vegetarianism and Theology
- Subtitle: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vegetarianism and Theology
- Editors: David Grumett and Rachel Muers
- Contributors: Michael Beer, David Brown, Samantha Jane Calvert, David Clough, Erika Cudworth, Daniel Dombrowski, James R. T. E. Gregory, David Grumett, David G. Horrell, Nathan MacDonald, Rachel Muers, Michael S. Northcott, Nigel Pleasants, Teresa M. Shaw, Christopher Southgate, John Wilkins
- Publisher: T&T Clark (A Continuum imprint), London and New York
- Publication Year: 2008
- Edition: First Edition (Hardback)
- ISBN-10: 0-567-03284-1
- ISBN-13: 978-0-567-03284-3
- Historical Period Covered: Ancient Near East / Biblical Antiquity (c. 1000 BCE–1st century CE), Classical and Hellenistic Greece (6th century BCE–2nd century CE), Early Christianity and Late Antiquity (1st–5th centuries CE), Early Medieval Ireland and Carolingian Europe (5th–9th centuries CE), High and Late Middle Ages (12th–15th centuries CE), Enlightenment and Early Modernity (16th–18th centuries), Victorian and Edwardian Eras (19th–early 20th centuries), and Contemporary Postmodernity/21st Century.
- Main Subject Areas: Practical and Systematic Theology, Biblical Studies (Old and New Testament Exegesis), Patristics and Late Ancient History, Classical Greek and Roman Philosophy, Celtic and Medieval Monastic History, Ecofeminist Theory, Philosophical Ethics (Deontology, Utilitarianism, Virtue Ethics, Social Contract Theory), Historical Sociology, and Environmental Ethics.
(Ch. 6, pp. 96–109)