2
Are we, then, to believe that Nature has implanted these emotions in these creatures because she is solicitous for the offspring of hens and dogs and bears, and not, rather, because she is striving to make us ashamed and to wound us, when we reflect that these instances are examples to those of us who would follow the lead of Nature, but to those who are callous, as rebukes for their insensibility, by citing which they i.e. the philosophers whose views Plutarch is criticizing. disparage human nature as being the only kind that has no disinterested affection and that does not know how to love without prospect of gain? In our theatres, indeed, people applaud the verse of the poet who said,Kock, Com. Att. Frag., iii. p. 450, ades. 218. What man will love his fellow-man for pay? And yet, according to Epicurus,Usener, Epicurea, p. 320, Frag. 527. it is for pay that a father loves his son, a mother her child, children their parents; but if beasts could come to understand speech and someone should bring together to a common theatre horses and cows and dogs and birds and should revise this speech and say, Dogs do not love their pups, nor horses their colts, nor birds their nestlings, for pay, but gratuitously and naturally, it would be recognized by the emotions of them all that this was well and truly spoken. For it is shameful - great Heaven! - that the begetting and the pains of travail and the nurture of beas ts should be Nature and a free gift, but that those of men should be loans and wages and caution-money, all given on condition of a return! cf. 496 c, infra.
