There was a lion, commemorated by Statius, which had “unlearnt murder
and homicide,” and submitted of its own accord to a master “who ought to
have been under its feet.” This lion went in and out of its cage and
gently laid down unhurt the prey which it caught: it even allowed people
to put their hands into its mouth. It was killed by a fugitive slave.
The Senate and people of Rome were in despair, and Imperial Cæsar, who
witnessed impassible the death of thousands of animals sent hither to
perish from Africa, from Scythia, from the banks of the Rhine, had tears
in his eyes for a single lion! In later Roman times a tame lion was a
favourite pet: their masters led them about wherever they went, whether
much to the gratification of the friends on whom they called is not
stated.
Another instance of a gentle beast was that of a tiger into whose cage a
live doe had been placed for him to eat. But the tiger was not feeling
well and, with the wisdom of sick animals, he was observing a diet. So
two or three days elapsed, during which the tiger made great friends
with the doe and when he recovered his health and began to feel very
hungry, instead of devouring his fellow-lodger he beat with his paws
against the bars of the cage in sign that he wanted food. These stories
were, no doubt, true, and there may have been truth also in the
well-known story of the lion which refused to attack a man who had once
succoured him. Animals have good memories.
One pleasanter feature of the circus was the exhibition of performing
beasts. Though the exhibitors of such animals are now sometimes charged
with cruelty, it cannot be denied that the public who goes to look at
them is composed of just the people who are most fond of animals. All
children delight in them because, to their minds, they seem a
confirmation of the strong instinctive though oftenest unexpressed
belief, which lurks in every child’s soul, that between man and animals
there is much less difference than is the correct, “grown-up” opinion;
this is a part of the secret lore of childhood which has its origins in
the childhood of the world. The amiable taste for these exhibitions—in
appearance, at least, so harmless—strikes one as incongruous in the same
persons who revelled in slaughter. Such a taste existed, however, and
when St. James said that there was not a single beast, bird or reptile
which had not been tamed, he may have been thinking of the itinerant
showmen’s “learned” beasts which perambulated the Roman empire.
Horses and oxen were among the animals commonly taught to do tricks. I
find no mention of monkeys as performing in the arena, though Apuleius
says that in the spring fêtes of Isis, the forerunners of the Roman
carnival, he saw a monkey with a straw hat and a Phrygian tunic—we can
hardly keep ourselves from asking: _what had it done with the
grind-organ?_ But in spite of this startlingly modern apparition,
monkeys do not seem to have been popular in Rome; I imagine even, that
there was some fixed prejudice against them. The cleverest of all the
animal performers were, of course, the dogs, and one showman had the
ingenious idea of making a dog act a part in a comedy. The effects of a
drug were tried on him, the plot turning on the suspicion that the drug
was poisonous, while, in fact, it was only a narcotic. The dog took the
piece of bread dipped in the liquid, swallowed it, and began to reel and
stagger till he finally fell flat on the ground. He gave himself a last
stretch and then seemed to expire, making no sign of life when his
apparently dead body was dragged about the stage. At the right moment,
he began to move very slightly as if waking out of a deep sleep; then he
raised his head, looked round, jumped up and ran joyously to the proper
person. The piece was played at the theatre of Marcellus in the reign of
old Vespasian, and Cæsar himself was delighted. I wonder that no manager
of our days has turned the incident to account; I never yet saw an
audience serious enough not to become young again at the sight of
four-footed comedians. Even the high art-loving public at the Prince
Regent’s theatre at Munich cannot resist a murmur of discreet merriment
when the pack of beautiful stag-hounds led upon the stage in the hunting
scene in “Tannhäuser” gravely wag their tails in time with the music!
The pet lions were only one example of the aberrations of pet-lovers in
ancient Rome. Maltese lap-dogs became a scourge: Lucian tells the
lamentable tale of a needy philosopher whom a fashionable lady cajoles
into acting as personal attendant to her incomparable Mirrhina. The
Maltese dog was an old fad; Theophrastus, in the portrait of an
insufferable _élégant_, mentions that, when his pet dog dies, he
inscribes “pure Maltese” on its tombstone.
Many were the birds that fell victims to the desire to keep them in
richly ornamented cages in which they died of hunger, says Epictetus,
sooner than be slaves. The canary which takes more kindly to captivity
was unknown till it was brought to Italy in the sixteenth century.
Parrots there were, but Roman parrots were not long-lived: they shared
the common doom: “To each his sufferings, all are _pets_.” The parrots
of Corinna and of Melior which ought to have lived to a hundred or, at
any rate, to have had the chance of dying of grief at the loss of their
possessors (as a parrot did that I once knew), enjoyed fame and fortune
for as brief a span as Lesbia’s sparrow. Melior’s parrot not only had
brilliant green feathers but also many accomplishments which are
described by its master’s friend, the poet Statius. On one occasion, it
sat up half the night at a banquet, hopping from one guest to another
and talking in a way that excited great admiration; it even shared the
good fare and on the morrow it died—which was less than surprising. I
came across an old-fashioned criticism of this poem in which Statius is
scolded for showing so much genuine feeling about ... a parrot! The
critic was right in one thing—the genuine feeling is there; those who
have known what a companion a bird may be, will appreciate the little
touch: “You never felt alone, dear Melior, with its open cage beside
you!” Now the cage is empty; it is “_la cage sans oiseaux_” which Victor
Hugo prayed to be spared from seeing. Some translator turned this into
“a nest without birds,” because he thought that a cage without birds
sounded unpoetical, but Victor Hugo took care of truth and left poetry
to take of itself. And whatever may be the ethics of keeping cage birds,
true it is that few things are more dismal than the sight of the little
mute, tenantless dwelling which was yesterday alive with fluttering
love.
We owe to Roman poets a good deal of information about dogs, and
especially the knowledge that the British hound was esteemed superior to
all others, even to the famous breed of Epirus. This is certified by
Gratius Faliscus, a contemporary of Ovid. He described these animals as
remarkably ugly, but incomparable for pluck. British bull-dogs were used
in the Colosseum, and in the third century Nemesianus praised the
British greyhound. Most of the valuable dogs were brought from abroad;
it is to be inferred that the race degenerated in the climate of Rome,
as it does now. Concha, whose epitaph was written by Petronius, was born
in Gaul. While Martial’s too elaborate epitaph on “The Trusty Lydia” is
often quoted and translated, the more sympathetic poem of Petronius has
been overlooked. He tells the perfections of Concha in a simple,
affectionate manner; like Lydia, she was a mighty huntress and chased
the wild boar fearlessly through the dense forest. Never did chain
hamper her liberty and never a blow fell on her shapely, snow-white
form. She reposed softly, stretched on the breast of her master or
mistress, and at night a well-made bed refreshed her tired limbs. If she
lacked speech, she could make herself understood better than any of her
kind—yet no one had reason to fear her bark. A hapless mother, she died
when her little ones saw the light, and now a narrow marble slab covers
the earth where she rests.
Cicero’s tribute to canine worth is well known: “Dogs watch for us
faithfully; they love and worship their masters, they hate strangers,
their powers of tracking by scent is extraordinary; great is their
keenness in the chase: what can all this mean but that they were made
for man’s advantage?” It was as natural to the Roman mind to regard man
as the lord of creation as to regard the Roman as the lord of man. For
the rest, his normal conception of animals differed little from that of
Aristotle. Cicero says that the chief distinction between man and
animals, is that animals look only to the present, paying little
attention to the past and future, while man looks before and after,
weighs causes and effects, draws analogies and views the whole path of
life, preparing things needful for passing along it. Expressed in the
key of antique optimism instead of in the key of modern pessimism, the
judgment is the same as that of Burns in his lines to the field-mouse:
“Still thou art blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only touches thee:
But, och! I backward cast my e’e
On prospects drear!
And forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess and fear.”
And of Leopardi in the song of the Syrian shepherd to his flock:—
“O flock that liest at rest, O blessed thou
That knowest not thy fate, however hard,
How utterly I envy thee!”
Cicero’s more virile mind would have spurned this craving to renounce
the distinguishing human privilege for the bliss of ignorance.
Wherever we fix the limits of animal intelligence, there is no question
of man’s obligation to treat sentient creatures with humanity. This was
recognised by Marcus Aurelius when he wrote the golden precept: “As to
animals which have no reason ... do thou, since thou hast reason, and
they have none, make use of them with a generous and liberal spirit.”
Here we have the broadest application of the narrowest assumption. From
the time, at least, that Rome was full of Greek teachers, there were
always some partisans of a different theory altogether. What Seneca
calls “the illustrious but unpopular school of Pythagoras” had a little
following which made up by its sincere enthusiasm for the fewness of its
members. Seneca’s own master Sotio was of this school, and his teaching
made a deep impression on the most illustrious of his pupils, who sums
up its chief points with his usual lucidity: Pythagoras gave men a
horror of crime and of parricide by telling them that they might
unawares kill or devour their own fathers; all sentient beings are bound
together in a universal kinship and an endless transmutation causes them
to pass from one form to another; no soul perishes or ceases its
activity save in the moment when it changes its envelope. Sotio took for
granted that the youths who attended his classes came to him with minds
unprepared to receive these doctrines, and he aimed more at making them
accept the consequences of the theory than the theory itself. What if
they believed none of it? What if they did not believe that souls passed
through different bodies and that the thing we call death is a
transmigration? That in the animal which crops the grass or which
peoples the sea, a soul resides which once was human? That, like the
heavenly bodies, every soul traverses its appointed circle? That nothing
in this world perishes, but only changes scene and place? Let them
remember, nevertheless, that great men have believed all this: “Suspend
your judgment, and in the meantime, respect whatever has life.” If the
doctrine be true, then to abstain from animal flesh is to spare oneself
the committal of crimes; if it be false, such abstinence is commendable
frugality; “all you lose is the food of lions and vultures.”
Sotio himself was a thorough Pythagorean, but there was another
philosopher of the name of Sestius who was an ardent advocate of
abstinence from animal food without believing in the transmigration of
souls. He founded a sort of brotherhood, the members of which took the
pledge to abide by this rule. He argued that since plenty of other
wholesome food existed, what need was there for man to shed blood?
Cruelty must become habitual when people devour flesh to indulge the
palate: “let us reduce the elements of sensuality.” Health would be also
the gainer by the adoption of a simpler and less various diet. Sotio
used these arguments of one whom he might have called an unbeliever, to
reinforce his own.
Seneca does not say if many of his schoolfellows were as much impressed
as he was by this teaching. For a year he abstained from flesh, and when
he got accustomed to it, he even found the new diet easy and agreeable.
His mind seemed to grow more active. That he was allowed to eat what he
liked without encountering interference or ridicule shows the
considerable freedom in which the youth of Rome was brought up: this
made them men. But at the beginning of the reign of Tiberius there went
forth an edict against foreign cults, and abstinence from flesh was held
to show a leaning towards religious novelties. For this reason the elder
Seneca advised his son to give up vegetarianism. Seneca honestly
confesses that he went back to better fare without much urging; yet he
always remained frugal, and he seems never to have felt quite sure that
his youthful experiment did not agree best with the counsels of
perfection.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
PLUTARCH THE HUMANE
PLUTARCH was the Happy Philosopher—and there were not many that were
happy. A life of travel, a life of teaching, an honoured old age as the
priest of Apollo in his native village in Bœotia: what kinder fate than
this? He was happy in the very obscurity which seems to have surrounded
his life at Rome, for it saved him from spite and envy. He was happy, if
we may trust the traditional effigies, even in that thing which likewise
is a good gift of the gods, a gracious outward presence exactly
corresponding with the soul within. A painter who wished to draw a type
of illimitable compassionateness would choose the face attributed to
Plutarch. Finally, this gentle sage is happy still after eighteen
hundred years in doing more than any other writer of antiquity to build
up character by diffusing the radiance of noble deeds. Nevertheless,
were he to come back to life he would have one disappointment, and that
would be to find how few people read his essays on kindness to animals:
they would stand a better chance of being read if they were printed
alone, but to arrive at them you must dive in the formidable depths of
the _Moralia_: a very storehouse of interesting things, but hardly
attractive to the general in a hurried age. Some of its treasures have
been revealed by Dr. Oakesmith in his admirable monograph on “The
Religion of Plutarch.” The mine of nobly humane sentiment remains,
however, almost unexplored.
The essays devoted to animals are three in number, with the titles:
“Whether terrestrial or aquatic animals are the more intelligent?” “That
animals have the use of Reason”; “On the habit of eating flesh.” The two
first are in the form of dialogues, and the third is a familiar
discourse, a _conférence_, such as those which now form a popular
feature of the Roman season. Through these studies there runs a vein of
transparent sincerity: we feel that they were composed not to show the
author’s cleverness or to startle by paradoxes, but with the real wish
to make the young men for whom they were intended a little more humane.
Plutarch did not take up the claims of animals because good “copy” could
be made out of them. As his wish is to persuade, he does not ask for the
impossible. It is the voice of the highly civilised Greek addressing the
young barbarians of Rome: for to the Greek’s inmost mind the Roman must
have always remained somewhat of a barbarian. There is great restraint:
though Plutarch must have loathed the games of the arena, he speaks of
them with guarded deprecation. He makes one of his characters say that
the chase (which he did not himself like) was useful in keeping people
from worse things, “such as the combats of gladiators.” He is genuinely
anxious by all means to persuade some, and for this reason he refrains
from scaring away his hearers or readers by extreme demands. Though he
has a strong personal repugnance to flesh-eating, he does not insist on
every one sharing it. Anyhow, he says, Be as humane as you can; cause as
little suffering as is possible; no doubt it is not easy, all at once,
to eradicate a habit which has taken hold of our sensual nature, but, at
least, let us deprive it of its worst features. Let us eat flesh if we
must, but for hunger, not for self-indulgence; let us kill animals but
still be compassionate—not heaping up outrages and tortures “as, alas,
is done every day.” He mentions how swans were blinded and then fattened
with unnatural foods, which is only a little worse than things that are
done now. What is certain is, that extreme and habitual luxury in food
has spelt decadence from the banquets of Babylon downwards.
Plutarch goes on to ask whether it is impossible to amuse ourselves
without all these excesses? Shall we expire on the spot, are the
resources of men totally exhausted, if the table be not supplied with
_pâtés de foies gras_? Is life not worth living without slaughter to
make a feast, slaughter to find a pastime; cannot we exist without
asking of certain animals that they show courage, and fight in spite of
themselves, or that they massacre other animals which have not the
natural energy to defend themselves? Must we for our sport tear the
mother from the little ones which she suckles or hatches? Plutarch
implores us not to imitate the children of whom Bion speaks, who amused
themselves by throwing stones at the frogs, but the frogs were not at
all amused—they simply died. “When we take our recreation, those who
help in the fun ought to share in it and be amused as well.” Thus does
the kind Greek philosopher exhort us
“Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”
Did Wordsworth know that his thought had been expressed so long before?
It matters little; the counsels of mercy never grow old.
With good sense and in that spirit of compromise which is really the
basis of morality, Plutarch argued that cruelty to animals does not lie
in the use but in the abuse of them; it is not cruel to kill them if
they are incompatible with our own existence; it is not cruel to tame
and train to our service those made by nature gentle and loving towards
man which become the companions of our toil according to their natural
aptitude. “Horse and ass are given to us,” as Prometheus says, “to be
submissive servants and fellow-workers; dogs to be guardians and
watchers, goats and sheep to give us milk and wool.” (Cow’s milk seems
to have been rarely drunk, as is still the case in the Mediterranean
islands and in Greece.)
“The Stoics,” says Plutarch, “made sensibility towards animals a
preparation to humanity and compassion because the gradually formed
habit of the lesser affections is capable of leading men very far.” In
the “Lives” he insists on the same point: “Kindness and beneficence
should be extended to creatures of every species, and these still flow
from the breast of a well-natured man as streams that issue from the
living fountain. A good man will take care of his horses and dogs not
only when they are young, but when old and past service.... We certainly
ought not to treat living creatures like shoes or household goods,
which, when worn out with use, we throw away, and were it only to learn
benevolence to human kind, we should be merciful to other creatures. For
my own part I would not sell even an old ox.”
Here I may say that Plutarch should have thanked Fate which made him a
philosopher and not a farmer. For how, alas, can the farmer escape from
becoming the accomplice of that which the Italian poet apostrophizes in
the words—
“Natura, illaudabil maraviglia,
Che per uccider partorisci e nutri!”
How can well-cared-for old age be the lot of more than a very few of the
animals that serve us so faithfully? The exception must console us for
the rule. The beautiful story of one such exception is told by both
Plutarch and Pliny the Elder. When Pericles was building the Parthenon a
great number of mules were employed in drawing the stones up the hill of
the Acropolis. Some of them became too old for the work, and these were
set at liberty to pasture at large. But one old mule gravely walked
every day to the stone-yard and accompanied, or rather led, the
procession of mule-carts to and fro. The Athenians were delighted with
its devotion to duty, and decided that it should be supported at the
expense of the State for the rest of its days. According to Pliny, the
mule of the Parthenon lived till it had attained its eightieth year, a
record that seems startling even having regard to the proverbial
longevity of pensioners. Plutarch does not mention it, perhaps, because
he had some doubts about its accuracy. In other respects the story may
be accepted as literally true; and does it not do us good to think of
it, as we look at the most glorious work of man’s hands bathed in the
golden afterglow? Does it not do us good to think that at the zenith of
her greatness Athens
“... Mother of arts
And eloquence, native to famous wits”
stooped—nay, rose—to generous appreciation of the willing service of an
old mule?
In dealing with animal psychology Plutarch makes a strong point of the
inherent improbability that, while feeling and imagination are the
common share of all animated beings, reason should be apportioned only
to a single species. “How can you say such things? Is not every one
convinced that no being can feel without also possessing understanding,
that there is not a single animal which has not a sort of thought and
reason just as he comes into the world with senses and instinct?”
Nature, which is said to make all things from one cause and to one end,
has not given sensibility to animals simply in order that they should be
capable of sensations. Since some things are good for them, and others
bad, they would not exist for a single instant if they did not know how
to seek the good and shun the bad. The animal learns by his senses what
things are good and what are bad for him, but when, in consequence of
these indications, of his senses, it is a question of taking and seeking
what is useful and of avoiding and flying from what is harmful, these
same animals would have no means of action if Nature had not made them
up to a certain point capable of reason, of judgment, of memory, and of
attention. Because, if you completely deprived them of the spirit of
conjecture, memory, foresight, preparation, hope, fear, desire, grief,
they would cease to derive the slightest utility from the eyes or ears
which they possess. Plutarch might have added that a mindless animal
would resemble not a child or a savage, but an idiot. He does point out
that they would be better off with no senses at all than with the power
of feeling and no power of acting upon it. But, he adds, could sensation
exist without intelligence? He quotes a line from I do not know what
poet:—
“The spirit only hears and sees—all else
Is deaf and blind.”
If we look with our eyes at a page of writing without seizing the
meaning of a word of it, because our thoughts are preoccupied, is it not
the same as if we had never seen it? But even were we to admit that the
senses suffice to their office, would that explain the phenomena of
memory and foresight? Would the animal fear things, not present, which
harm him, or desire things, not present, which are to his advantage?
Would he prepare his retreat or shelter or devise snares by which to
catch other animals? Only one theory can be applied to mind in man and
mind in animals.