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AUTOBULUS.
This, my friend, has been spoken from the heart. 1 We certainly must not allow philosophers, as though they were women in difficult labour, to put about their necks a charm for speedy delivery so that they may bring justice to birth for us easily and without hard labour. For they themselves do not concede to Epicurus, 2 for the sake of the highest considerations, a thing so small and trifling as the slightest deviation of a single atom-which would permit the stars and living creatures to slip in by chance and would preserve from destruction the principle of free will. But, seeing that they bid him demonstrate whatever is not obvious or take as his starting-point something that is obvious, how are they in any position to make this statement about animals 3 a basis of their own account of justice, when it is neither generally accepted nor otherwise demonstrated by them? 4 For justice has another way to establish itself, a way which is neither so treacherous nor so precipitous, nor is it a route lined with the wreckage of obvious truths. It is the road which, under the guidance of Plato, 5 my son and your companion, 6 Soclarus, points out to those who have no love of wrangling, but are willing to be led and to learn. For certain it is that Empedocles 7 and Heraclitus 8 accept as true the charge that man is not altogether innocent of injustice when he treats animals as he does; often and often do they lament and exclaim against Nature, declaring that she is Necessity and War, that she contains nothing unmixed and free from tarnish, that her progress is marked by many unjust inflictions. As an instance, say. even birth itself springs from injustice, since it is a union of mortal with immortal, and the offspring is nourished unnaturally on members torn from the parent.
These strictures, however, seem to be unpalatably strong and bitter; for there is an alternative, an inoffensive formula which does not, on the one hand, deprive beasts of reason, yet does, on the other, preserve the justice of those who make fit use of them. When the wise men of old had introduced this, gluttony joined luxury to cancel and annul it; Pythagoras,
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however, reintroduced it, teaching us how to profit without injustice. There is no injustice, surely, in punishing and slaying animals that are anti-social and merely injurious, while taming those that are gentle and friendly to man and making them our helpers in the tasks for which they are severally fitted by nature
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:
Offspring of horse and ass and seed of bulls
which Aeschylus’
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Prometheus says that he bestowed on us
To serve us and relieve our labours;
and thus we make use of dogs as sentinels and keep herds of goats and sheep that are milked and shorn.
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For living is not abolished nor life terminated when a man has no more platters of fish or pate de foie gras or mincemeat of beef or kids’ flesh for his banquets
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- or when he no longer, idling in the theatre or hunting for sport, compels some beasts against their will to stand their ground and fight, while he destroys others which have not the instinct to fight back even in their own defence. For I think sport should be joyful and between playmates who are merry on both sides, not the sort of which Bion
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spoke when he remarked that boys throw stones at frogs for fun, but the frogs don’t die for
fun, but in sober earnest.
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Just so, in hunting and fishing, men amuse themselves with the suffering and death of animals, even tearing some of them piteously from their cubs and nestlings. The fact is that it is not those who make use of animals who do them wrong, but those who use them harmfully and heedlessly and in cruel ways. De sollertia animalium. Plutarch. Harold Cherniss (Translator), William C. Helmbold (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1957.
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