Tres Orationes

—which is the paradise of pleasure, in which that man, a citizen of the world, might live. After the true recognition of his Archetype, of whom he himself was an exemplar, he would exercise and, by exercising, recall those things in which his soul was skilled from its very origin. But after he crossed the limits of the command and departed from the prescription of his duty, the method of his sustenance was changed somewhat, and the πρωτόπλας first-formed one was deprived of the spontaneous fertility of the earth, which had learned to be fertile before without the work and art of the farmer. Together with his posterity, he was divinely rejected to Ceres Classical deity of agriculture. and the herbs of the field, which were destined for the grazing of cattle. Yet the time had not yet arrived for κρεωφαγίαν meat-eating, nor were mouths polluted with blood in that most fruitful beginning, under a heaven that was still new and therefore more benign. Only under Noah (who is the οἰκιστής founder of the human race, its restorer and second propagator, and, as Theodoretus says, as it were a spark of the whole of nature, and according to the author of the Book of Wisdom, a σπέρμα γνώσεως seed of knowledge for the world about to be born; the fables of the Greeks hence called him Deucalion), when the age was fouled by the shedding of blood and blood was already known to men, was it permitted to eat meat. This was perhaps because the iron age, that is, the giants before the flood, had dared to undermine and break the first law of living—simple indeed, but more consistent with nature—having been captured by illicit desires and, amid the abundance of all things, lifted by lust toward pleasures that were completely alien to nature and the society of living things.