How to care about animals with Porphyry and friends

Part XXXV of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series

[Based on How to Care about Animals: An Ancient Guide to Creatures Great and Small, translated by M.D. Usher. Full book series here.]

When it comes to caring for animals, I bet the Greco-Romans aren’t the first thing that comes to your mind. After all, countless wild animals were slaughtered for the pleasure of emperors, senators, and the plebe at large in many arenas all over the Roman Empire.

And yet, it is Cicero, among others, who complains about it. In a letter he wrote to his friend Marius he describes the spectacle of some magnificent games organized by Pompey in 55 BCE to celebrate his second Consulship, during which twenty elephants and two hundred lions were killed:

“[There were] two wild-beast hunts, lasting five days, magnificent—nobody denies it—and yet, what pleasure can it be to a man of refinement, when either a weak man is torn by an extremely powerful animal, or a splendid animal is transfixed by a hunting spear? … The last day was that of the elephants, on which there was a great deal of astonishment on the part of the vulgar crowd, but no pleasure whatever. Nay, there was even a certain feeling of compassion aroused by it, and a kind of belief created that that animal has something in common with mankind.”

Translator’s Mark Usher’s premise in putting together the excerpts that comprise the book is that the ancients were much closer to nature and to animals than most of us tend to be nowadays, and so had a different rapport with both. As he puts it: “This afforded them a sensitivity to their environs and fellow creatures, born of necessity, that can help disabuse us of our shortsighted presentism and counteract our technology-enhanced disconnectedness from Nature.”

Usher’s choices to prompt us to reflect on our own relationship with animals are most definitely thought provoking. They include the Neoplatonist Porphyry’s arguments in favor of vegetarianism; the poet Theognis’s discussion of the behavior of octopodes, derived from the experience of sponge divers; Pliny the Elder’s moving (and sometimes fantastical) description of the behavior of elephants; Aristotle’s studies in biology; Seneca’s argument that animals are both ecologically and morally superior to humans; and my favorite, Plutarch’s comic dialogue between Odysseus and one of his former comrades turned pig by the sorceress Circe. Let me give you a small sampler.

“Even in dealing with animals that are less pleasing to the senses, when a person of natural philosophic bent considers them from a scientific point of view, someone who can understand the causes of things, Nature, in displaying its handiwork, presents pleasures beyond compare.” (Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 1.5)

As a biologist myself, I know exactly what Aristotle is talking about here. He’s referring to the awe of nature that any natural scientist worth her salt experiences, which indeed is very often the reason why one becomes a scientist in the first place, before one gets lost in the rat race of academia and the “publish or perish” culture that characterizes it.

Here is Seneca complaining about our lack of environmental wisdom compared to other animals:

“How long will we beseech the gods for things as if we were not yet able to take care of ourselves? How long will we flood the markets of great cities with grain? How long must the masses bring in the harvest for our sakes? How long must many ships, arriving not from just one sea, convey the accoutrements for a single meal? A bull is sated on a pasture of the fewest acres. One forest is enough for a great many elephants. The human being feeds on land and sea. … How little it is that our nature requires. Its needs are met with but a morsel. It’s not the hunger of our bellies that costs us so much. It’s overreach.” (Letters, 60)

And that was over two millennia ago. Now our overreach has gotten to the point of imperiling all the world’s ecosystems, and therefore also human survival itself. But Zeus forbid we are going to be deprived of out-of-season delicacies that can only be imported from the other side of the planet.

Pliny the Elder, in the eighth book of his Natural History declares elephants to be the animals closest to humans in intelligence. And yet:

“People have begun to cut elephant bones, too, into layers, on account of a lack of resources, for an abundance of tusks is hard to find, except ones from India, since everything else in our world has fallen prey to luxury.”

Again, then, the problem is overreach and greed, not to mention stupidity. All human, not animal, characteristics. Which leads me to Porphyry, a Neoplatonist writing in the third century CE. In book three of his On Abstaining From Animals he says:

“Eating animate creatures does not further the cause of moderation, simplicity, or piety, which are what bring a contemplative life to perfection. In fact, it impedes this goal. … It’s the ignorant person who has done no research about animals that is misguided, aided in this error by his own greediness with respect to them. … Accordingly, the Pythagoreans made kindness to animals a form of training in humanity and compassion.”

Here vegetarianism is seen as a way to cultivate one of the four cardinal virtues, temperance, while ignorance and greed are taken to be the motivators of eating flesh. Note the observation that all the way back to the Pythagoreans of the 6th century BCE people have recognized a connection between one’s treatment of animals and that person’s degree of humanity.

A 1st century Roman relief shows gladiators fighting wild animals. Image from history.com.

My favorite excerpt from Usher’s selection, as I said, is the dialogue between Odysseus and a pig. The latter was a former human companion of the King of Ithaca, but Circe had turned him into a pig. Odysseus arrogantly assumes that the pig wants to be brought back into human form, pleading with Circe so that the transformation can be reversed. But Circe advises Odysseus to question his assumptions about the inherent superiority of humanity and actually talk to the pig, named Gryllus. What follows is both hilarious and insightful:

Odysseus: “I have asked Circe to release and restore to his former state any man who wants it and to send him back with me.”

Gryllus: “Stop right there, Odysseus. … You were said to be clever and were thought to exceed all other men in intelligence, but these were empty claims. You’re afraid of changing from what is worse to what is better, not having considered the matter. … If you’re willing to talk it over instead of flinging insults, I will quickly make you agree that, seeing that we are acquainted with both ways of life, it makes sense for us to be content with this one instead of our former one.”

Odysseus: “Alright, then. I’m keen to hear it.”

Gryllus begins by questioning Odysseus’s reason, the very characteristic that has made him famous worldwide.

Gryllus: “Answer me this, cleverest of men: I once heard you telling Circe about the Cyclops’s land, how it’s not ploughed at all, nor does anyone plant anything in it, yet it is of such natural good quality that it bears every sort of fruit of its own accord. Do you, then, praise this land more than rough, goat-foddering Ithaca, which yields scanty, shabby returns worth nothing to its farmers, and even that obtained only with much work and great toil? See to it that you don’t take offense and answer contrary to what is obvious out of partiality for your homeland.”

And Odysseus has to admit that his pride in his own homeland is rather foolish and not at all rational. The discussion then shifts to the virtues:

Odysseus: “Tell me, Gryllus, what of kind of virtue do animals ever possess?”