The Ancient Idea of Vegetarianism

Abstract

Modern notions and substrata of vegetarianism cannot be easily grafted onto ancient theories of diet, but the social, environmental and moral pathways which lead to these dietary choices have some broad antecedents in ancient literature (as do the negative stereotypes: see the passage of Euripides’s Hippolytus below, §52); the arguments of Porphyry in particular prefigure many modern arguments against eating meat. Meat eating was generally associated with sacrifice, although the question of whether ‘it was not allowed to Pagans to eat unsacrificed meat’¹ cannot be satisfactorily answered by any ancient text.² The potential for ethical distinction between different types of meat is also diminished by such generalizing statements: for the ancient Greeks and Romans there were important differences in status between flesh from animals which were hunted and trapped versus domestic pigs, sheep, goats and cattle; birds and fish were also widely caught and eaten (see Chapter 9). From the Hippocratic Corpus, the second of four essays entitled ‘On regimen’ (Peri diaitês) gives some idea of the range of meats available to the Classical gourmand, listing the digestive qualities of the flesh of cows and veal calves, goats and kids, sheep and lambs, pigs and piglets, donkeys, horses and foals, dogs and puppies, wild boars, hares, and foxes and hedgehogs, as well as several birds, fish and crustaceans (rather aptly, the work is widely considered the earliest classification of animals in Classical literature).³