INTRODUCTION
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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).This was Hirzel’s opinion (Der Dialog, ii, p. 126, n. 2), which Ziegler (RE, s.v. Plutarchos, col. 734) combats. In spite of the exaggerated and calculated rhetoricF. Krauss, Die rhetorischen Schriften Plutarchs, pp. 77 ff. these fragments probably depict faithfully a foible of Plutarch’s early manhood, the Pythagorean or OrphicPlato, Laws, 782 c. Plutarch, Mor. 159 c, makes Solon say, To refrain entirely from eating meat, as they record of Orpheus long ago, is rather a quibble than a way of avoiding wrong diet. 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.
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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.
