Justice for Animals

Did Greek and Roman writers and thinkers believe animals had a sense of justice, and thus were owed justice? The first writer known to say yes to this was the fifth century bce Sicilian Greek Empedocles, who says that, in the beginning, all animals were tame and friendly.

Empedocles went on to argue that humans owed animals justice because the two resembled one another. They were both living creatures that drew breath and they exchanged souls thanks to metempsychosis. Animals' souls, Empedocles taught, had once belonged to people, and vice versa. For people to kill animals was thus murder. Empedocles imagined a father sacrificing an animal only to realise that he was sacrificing a being with the soul of his own deceased son: ‘After his son has changed shape, his utter fool of a father slaughters him yet prays... Deaf to any protests, the father makes an evil meal of him after slaughtering him... In the same way, a son can kill his father and children can kill their mother'.^[978] To avoid this sort of parricide, Greeks ought to foreswear animal sacrifice. One god, at least, would not complain: Empedocles' version of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

This doctrine offers a stunning reversal of Greek law and customs, one achieved at a very high religious price - a world ruled by female Love Incarnate and peopled by interchangeable humans and animals.

A religious sect might accept this vision of justice, but a Greek polis scarcely would, unless the sect wrote the laws. And one such sect emerged about the time Empedocles wrote, or emerged somewhat earlier, that of the Pythagoreans. Although they did not accept Empedocles' version of early history, and did not worship a supreme love goddess, this sect did believe in metempsychosis and at some early date objected to animal sacrifice for this reason.^[980] They added some qualifications of their own. Although animals have souls, just as people do, plants do not, and so sacrifices may include grain as well as honey and incense. Some Pythagoreans did not regard fish as being akin to human beings in the way that mammals were, and so sacrifices of fish, which took place as a kind of sacrifice of first fruits, were acceptable. Pythagoreans also conceded that some animals were wild and dangerous. They ought to be killed, but not sacrificed; their flesh should not be eaten at sacrificial meals. The Pythagoreans endorsed the custom of protecting work­ing oxen, but for a reason of their own: all productive animals should be cared for.^[981] The value set on productive animals implied abolishing sacrifice of the four main species - cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs - but no Pythagorean is known to say so.

In contrast, one late Pythagorean argued that these four species of victims never had human souls, and thus might be killed in sacrificial rituals. Others said that the meat of sacrifice, and other meat, was permissible to athletes, soldiers and others benefiting from high protein diets.³² In these instances, we can glimpse a Greek kind of political realism. A city or community without animal sacrifice was practically inconceivable, even if it was intellectually attractive, and so the Pythagoreans sometimes compromised.

Other philosophical schools compromised, too. The Stoics argued that animals had no reasoning powers and scarcely knew right from wrong, but deserved sympathy because they somewhat resembled human beings. Animal sacrifice was permissible, but not essential. The Epicureans had a better opinion of the reasoning powers of animals than did the Stoics, but most of them did not think animals were capable of making and keeping agreements, and believed that for this reason animals could not participate in acts of justice. Epicurean justice was contractual, not retributive, as justice was in Aristotle and other Greek authors.³³

The intellectual drawback to these sundry views was that they did not explain how the mistaken practice of animal sacrifice arose. A philosopher of the fourth century bce, Theophrastus, provided this missing piece in the vegetarian polemic against sacrifice. This writer, who was Aristotle's succes­sor as head of the Peripatos school of philosophy and science, agreed with Empedocles and others that human history began with a golden age lacking animal sacrifice. In Theophrastus, however, the golden age featured gradual improvements in the human diet. Tools improved also, and men learned to use fire, and once men had greater power to wreak destruction, the first wars took place. War led to privation and famine, so humans began hunting, and later they domesticated some species of animals and slaughtered them for food. War within the human species thus led to a kind of war on both wild and domestic animals.^[982]

Theophrastus' perspective, preserved in the late Pythagorean and Platonist philosopher Porphyry, differed from that of Empedocles by being secular and speculative rather than religious and mythic. It involved hunting, animal husbandry and the development of tools and warfare, but it did not involve any rites or gods, still less a unique goddess such as the Incarnate Love of Empedocles. In this respect, Theophrastus' explanation showed the influence of his master, Aristotle, and it anticipated other speculation about the devel­opment of tools and agriculture.^[983]

Faced with the views of Theophrastus, most Greeks would ask whether the gods were not responsible for the practice of meat eating.

The first case concerns the custom of sacrificing pigs in Attica: ‘The people link the slaughter of pigs to an involuntary wrong done by Clymene. She struck an animal of this species accidentally, and killed it.' After expressing his own disapproval of this ‘wrong', Porphyry goes on to report the reaction of an Olympian god, Apollo: ‘Her father was worried about her, for she had acted lawlessly, and went to Delphi and asked the oracle. The god accepted what had happened. For the future, he determined that the business [of sacrifice] was a matter of indifference.'^[985] As Porphyry admits, the sacrifice of pigs now became normal. Taking the lives of these animals was no longer a moral or legal issue. Unlike the accidental death of a human being, it is a matter of indifference to the god. Animals deserve some justice, and so the Athenians consult Delphi, but animals do not deserve the same justice as human beings.

Porphyry's next story is somewhat longer:

Episcopus, who was one of the priests called theopropoi, wanted to make the first sacrifice of sheep, and people say that he very discretely accepted the oracle that goes like this: ‘It isn't lawful for you to kill the perambulatory race of sheep...

In this version of early Athenian religion, cult once again exists already, and an oracle, no doubt from Apollo at Delphi, pronounces sacrifice acceptable. This time, though, the god imposes a condition: the animal must go willingly to its death. Apollo's legal reasoning differs somewhat from the previous case. Animals deserve some measure of justice, and so killing them must somehow be excused. The animals themselves will excuse it, by making a gesture of approbation.

The gesture, alas, is a fraud. Any alert sheep will nod when it has water poured over it. The head will move from side to side, a kind of nod that conventionally meant approbation in ancient Greece, just as a nod up and down means approbation today. Other Greek sources show that pouring water over an animal's head had another purpose, to see whether it was lively and healthy. If it were not, the god would not find the offering satisfactory.^[986] Porphyry's misinterpretation of this custom allowed him to introduce ques­tions of guilt and responsibility that otherwise would not arise.

In the third story, Porphyry gives an account of an Athenian festival, the Bouphonia, meaning ‘murder of cattle': ‘When he was priest of Zeus Polieus, Diomus was the first to slaughter an ox... The ox tasted the sacred cake and he killed the creature, getting everyone nearby to join in.' The priest now stood trial, but he presented a novel defence: the knife used to kill the ox was responsible for the crime, and the priest was not. Those who assisted the priest offered the same defence. Here we can discern the origin of the odd Athenian murder court that Aristotle says dealt with guilty objects and animals. Porphyry concludes the story by admitting that the human defen­dants avoided being convicted. As for the animal, it had eaten an offering, and deserved to die. Zeus gives his tacit approval to the acquittal of the defen­dants.

This much discussed passage, along with others relating to the same festival, was the main one that led Burkert and others to speculate that the Greeks felt guilty about killing animals.^[987] The issue of guilt aside, the elements in the scene are familiar: a cult, an accident, a divine response to the first death of a sacrificial victim. On two counts, the response differs from those reported before. It comes from Zeus, not Apollo, and it takes a new form, the god's tacit endorsement of a court that fails to act against the killers.^[988]

Porphyry no doubt would have preferred to find stories in which the gods disapproved of animal sacrifice. Yet he apparently found none. He did find (and very briefly reported) a fourth story featuring an oracle. This time, Apollo prescribed general, Pan-Hellenic sacrificial rules for domesticated animals, but Porphyry does not say why.⁴¹

After citing these ‘indecent' stories, Abstaining from Meat gives philosophi­cal reasons for vegetarian and even vegan diets. As a work about religious law, however, it ends here. The answer to the question of why the Greeks provided little justice to animals is that the gods told them to. And what were the gods' reasons? Not mainly that animals themselves had done wrong and deserved to die. That holds true only of the third and last story. Mainly, the gods did not explain themselves. They let accidental killing provide a precedent and they let worshippers misinterpret animal behaviour. In essence, the gods did not make the laws about sacrifice; instead, they justified the human wish or impulse to sacrifice animals. For the gods to respond otherwise, they would have had to be very different beings, like the Incarnate Love of Empedocles.

Porphyry himself believes in a vegetarian hierarchy of gods. There are, he declares, four kinds of supernatural beings. Highest is the one true god, who wants only incorporeal offerings that take the form of a spiritual sacrifice or mental exercise. Second comes a rank of gods who are less abstract and want offerings in the form of songs and prayerful thoughts. Third come the Olympian gods and some others, such as gods of heavenly bodies. They want vegetal offerings. Fourth and last come beings that Porphyry terms daimones, or demons; and they alone want sacrificial victims. High gods reject blood sacrifice, and only lesser, wicked creatures desire it.^[989] (Porphyry cannot resist adding that the demons want animals burned whole, as holocausts, rather than butchered to feed worshippers. Even these debased beings serve the cause of the vegetarians.)^[990]

In justifying the ways of beasts to men, Porphyry had set himself a difficult task. Hesiod, one of the two chief religious authorities among the Greek authors (Homer being the other), says, ‘Heed justice. Completely forget about violence (bia). The son of Cronus assigned the norm of practicing justice to human beings. He let fish and beasts and winged birds eat each other, for there is no justice in them. He gave justice to human beings, and it is the much the best thing.'^[991] Hesiod compactly states the case against animals being just or deserving justice. Animals commit cannibalism, not as an occasional crime but as a daily necessity. They deserve punishment, and punished they are, by being hunted, fished and sacrificed. Hesiod's views prevailed. Massive animal sacrifice continued, not until vegetarianism replaced it but until Christianity replaced ancient paganism.