Lipsius’s Singular Dissertation on Food and Drink

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Indeed, while I perform my duties, breathe upon me the breeze of your goodwill and sincerity, most excellent listeners; open the empty halls of your ears—as I already joyfully see you doing of your own accord.

I shall strive as much as I can so that no one regrets the spending of even a half-hour's time, nor repents of this attendance. I can promise this: I shall treat countless matters concisely, with vigorous loftiness, and great worth, yet all briefly. I shall use no oratorical pomp—for I do not seek that prize, but gladly yield it to the masters of eloquence—and having pruned away all verbal luxury and neglected mere polish, I shall pursue my task.

For the present, however, I do not intend to speak of those who abstain from certain foods either by religious law and vow, by their own will, or by the specific advice and persuasion of physicians, merely to obey necessity, to care for or preserve their health, to diminish pleasure, or to satisfy religious duty.

Thus the sect of the ESSENES A Jewish sect known for asceticism and strict communal living., and several others (as can be seen in the works of polyhistors original: Polyhistores, referring to authors of wide-ranging historical and encyclopedic knowledge.), abstained either from meat entirely—as we see the devout CARTHUSIANS A silent, cloistered Catholic order known for extreme dietary restrictions, including never eating meat. doing today by vow—or at least from certain animals, as did the ISRAELITES in the Old Testament by the command of JEHOVAH.

Regarding the EGYPTIAN PRIESTS, it is well known from Porphyry and Herodotus that they utterly fled from meat and wine as if they were the surest nurseries of lust original: libidinis seminaria; they even avoided milk and eggs among their foods (calling the former "liquid flesh" and the latter "blood with a changed color"), and they did not so much as taste fish.

Perhaps following this example—though this may seem like a leap outside my own circle original: saltus extra chorum meum, an idiom for wandering off-topic or beyond one’s expertise.—was CASPAR SCHOPPIUS THE FRANK A famous 17th-century scholar known for his conversion to Catholicism and his intense, often combative, intellectual life., with whom, before he departed for Italy, I forged a bond of friendship at Heidelberg that was intended to last forever...