These two badly mutilated discourses, urging the necessity for vegetarianism, are merely extracts from a series (see 996 a) which Plutarch delivered in his youth, perhaps to a Boeotian audience (995 e). ¹ In spite of the exaggerated and calculated rhetoric ² these fragments probably depict faithfully a foible of Plutarch’s early manhood, the Pythagorean or Orphic ³ abstention from animal food. There is little trace of this in his later life as known to us, though a corrupt passage in the Symposiacs (635 e) seems to say that because of a dream our author abstained from eggs for a long time. In the De Sanitate Tuenda also (132 a) Plutarch excuses flesh-eating on the ground that habit has become a sort of unnatural second nature.

The work appears, on the whole, rather immature beside the Gryllus and the De Sollertia Animalium, but the text is so poor that this may not be the author’s fault. In fact the excerptor responsible for our jumbled text, introducing both stupid interpolations (see especially 998 a) and even an extract from an entirely different work (994 b-d), may well have altered Plutarch’s wording in many other places where we have not the means to detect him.

Porphyry ⁴ ( De Abstinentia, iii. 24) says that Plutarch attacked the Stoics and Peripatetics in many books; in this one the anti-Stoic polemic has only just begun (999 a) when the work breaks off. For a more complete assault the reader must turn back to the two preceding dialogues.

It is interesting to learn that Shelley found these fragments inspiring. In the eighth book of Queen Mab (verses 211 ff.) we read: To this passage the poet appended, more suo, a long note which ended with four quotations from our essay in Greek, untranslated (a compliment to the public of his day, one may suppose). This note he subsequently republished as A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813), omitting the Greek; and in the same year he wrote to Thomas Hogg that he had translated the two Essays of Plutarch, Περὶ σαρκοφαγίας. But this has been lost; it has not, at least, been found among the unpublished Shelley material in the Bodleian. ⁵

This is one of the eighteen works of the received Corpus of Plutarch that do not appear in the Lamprias Catalogue. Such a fact is not, however, to be adduced against its genuineness, since the Symposiacs themselves are not to be found there. ⁶