This was the only festival that those times had discovered; all else was a medley of anguish and gloom. But you who live now, what madness, what frenzy drives you to the pollution of shedding blood, you who have such a superfluity of necessities? Why slander the earth by implying that she cannot support you? Why impiously offend law-giving Demeter
11 and p547 bring shame upon Dionysus, lord of the cultivated vine,
12 the gracious one, as if you did not receive enough from their hands? Are you not ashamed to mingle domestic crops with blood and gore? You call serpents and panthers and lions savage, but you yourselves, by your own foul slaughters, leave them no room to outdo you in cruelty; Bfor their slaughter is their living, yours is a mere appetizer."
13 (...)
We declare, then, that it is absurd for them to say that the practice of flesh-eating is based on Nature. For that man is not naturally carnivorous is, in the first place, obvious from the structure of his body.
18 A man's frame is in no way similar to those creatures who were made for flesh-eating: he has no hooked beak or sharp nails or jagged teeth, 995no strong stomach or warmth of vital fluids able to digest and assimilate a heavy diet of flesh.
19 It is from this very fact, the evenness of our teeth, the smallness of our mouths, the softness of our tongues, our possession of vital fluids too inert to digest meat that Nature disavows our eating of flesh. If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, p553 unaided by cleaver or cudgel orº any kind of axe. Rather, just as wolves and bears and lions themselves slay what they eat, Bso you are to fell an ox with your fangs or a boar with your jaws, or tear a lamb or hare in bits. Fall upon it and eat it still living, as animals do.
20 But if you wait for what you eat to be dead, if you have qualms about enjoying the flesh while life is still present, why do you continue, contrary to nature, to eat what possesses life? Even when it is lifeless and dead, however, no one eats the flesh just as it is; men boil it and roast it, altering it by fire and drugs, recasting and diverting and smothering with countless condiments the taste of gore so that the palate may be deceived and accept what is foreign to it.
It was, indeed, a witty remark of the Spartan
21 who bought a little fish in an inn Cand gave it to the innkeeper to prepare. When the latter asked for cheese and vinegar and oil,
22 the Spartan said, "If I had those, I should not have bought a fish." But we are so refined in our blood-letting that we term flesh a supplementary food;
23 and then we need "supplements" for the flesh itself, mixing oil, wine, honey, fish paste, vinegar, with Syrian and Arabian spices,
24 as though we were really embalming a corpse for p555 burial. The fact is that meat is so softened and dissolved and, in a way, predigested that it is hard for digestion to cope with it; and if digestion loses the battle, the meats affect us with dreadful pains and malignant forms of indigestion.
