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Note that the eating of flesh is not only physically against nature, but it also makes us spiritually coarse and gross by reason of satiety and surfeit. For wine and indulgence in meat make the body strong and vigorous, but the soul weak. A quotation from the medical writer Androcydes; see Mor. 472 b and the note. And in order that I may not offend athletes, I shall take my own people as examples. It is a fact that the Athenians used to call us Boeotians Cf. Rhys Roberts, The Ancient Boeotians, pp. 1-5. beef-witted and insensitive and foolish, precisely because we stuffed ourselves.The passage that follows is badly mutilated: it probably contained other quotations and fuller ones than the mss. indicate. These men are swine Cf. the proverbial sow and Athena (Life of Demosthenes, xi. 5, 851 b and Mor. 803 d) and the Introduction to the Gryllus.; and MenanderKock, Com. Att. Frag. iii, p. 238 (frag. 748 Koerte); the words probably mean Who are greedy fellows. says, Who have jaws; and Pindar Olympians, vi. 89, which continues whether we are truly arraigned by that ancient gibe, Boeotian swine. (For this interpretation see G. Norwood, Pindar, pp. 82 and 237.) And then to learn ; A dry soul is wisest according to Heraclitus.Diels-Kranz, Frag. der Vorsok. i, p. 100, frag. B 118; cf. the note on Mor. 432 f. Empty jars make a noise when struck, but full ones do not resound to blows. Cf. Mor. 721 b-d. Thin bronze objects will pass the sounds from one to another in a circle until you dampen and deaden the noise with your hand as the beat goes round. Mor. 721 c-d suggests that Plutarch is talking about a single cauldron with a wave going around it rather than about a circular arrangement of tuning forks. Sounding brass: cf. L. Parmentier, Recherches sur l’Isis et Osiris (Mem. Acad. Roy. Belg. ii, vol. II, 1912/13), pp. 31 ff. The eye Cf. Mor. 714 d. when it is flooded by an excess of moisture grows dim and weakened for its proper task. When we examine the sun through dank atmosphere and a fog of gross vapours, we do not see it clear and bright, but submerged and misty, with elusive rays. In just the same way, then, when the body is turbulent and surfeited and burdened with improper food, the lustre and light of the soul inevitably come through it blurred and confused, aberrant and inconstant, since the soul lacks the brilliance and intensity to penetrate to the minute and obscure issues of active life.
