Dissertation on Loathing and Hatred

Page 8

...lived, like a German Stoic A reference to someone living with extreme self-discipline and austerity., having first swapped wine for water. He permanently banished meat from his table, forbade fish and eggs from the kitchen, and lives content with only half a cabbage and a little rice, along with a pear or apple and a small piece of cheese. He writes that he is accustomed to endure this same routine for the full twenty-four hours—taking breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late-night snacks—solely for the sake of health, and lest he waste his labor and oil original: operam perdat & oleum, a Latin idiom meaning to waste time and effort, like burning a lamp at night for no result. while reading authors.

Garcia da Orta as cited by de Orta and Eusebius and Eusebius are the authorities for the fact that the Brahmans, or as some prefer to read, the Banians original: Baneanes, likely referring to the Bania or merchant caste in India, often observed by Europeans to be strictly vegetarian., the philosophers of India, never killed a living thing, nor ate anything that had been killed. ORPHEUS, who also detested the eating of meat original: κρεοφαγίαν (kreophagia) in a specific poem, attempted to introduce this practice among the THRACIANS; PYTHAGORAS among the IONIANS; and NUMA POMPILIUS among the ROMANS.

Plutarch is the source stating that the followers of PYTHAGORAS were especially careful to avoid the eating of FISH. They believed it was a matter of extreme injustice to hunt, kill, and devour an animal that nature itself intended to never harm—nor even be capable of harming—mankind. Furthermore, they held that eating fish was not a matter of necessity, but rather of luxury and the superfluous pleasure of gluttony.

Moreover, all the ancients, particularly the Athenians, were opposed to eating Brain as something ominous in food. And the people of Pelusium An ancient city in the eastern Nile Delta. abstained from Onions, because among all vegetables, onions alone have cycles of growth and shrinking that are contrary to the phases of the moon. For the onion—and how few people are aware of this?—turns green again as the moon wanes and dries up as the moon waxes.

In this way, GALEN, easily the prince and leader of physicians, out of a love for health—as he himself reveals in his Commentary on Good Juices original: Comment. de Euchymia—declared war at all times [upon various foods], with the exception only of figs and excellently ripened grapes, and...