Dryden's "vegetarian" philosopher: Pythagoras

Eighteenth-Century Life

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 1-28

  Corse, Taylor ^a  

^a ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 77949700193     PISSN: 00982601     EISSN: 10863192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00982601-2009-009     Document Type: Review

References (87)

1. Dryden, Poems 1697-1700, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, vol. 7 of The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 2000), 484. All quotations from Dryden are from the text of this edition; in the case of prose, I will cite the page numbers, for poetry, the line numbers. Dryden's version is a third longer than Ovid's (611 lines to 403), which is in keeping with his expansive style of literary translation.
2. "Parcite, mortales, dapibus temerare nefandis corpora" [my translation]. Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (1916; rep. Cambridge: Harvard Univ., 1976), book 15, lines 75-76. All quotations from the Latin text of Ovid are from this edition, with the line numbers indicated.
3. See Plutarch's "On the Cleverness of Animals," from Plutarch's Morals: In Five Volumes. Translated from the Greek by Several Hands [1684-94], 5 vols., 4th ed. (London, 1704), 5:149. Dryden supervised a new translation and edition of Plutarch's Lives in 1684.
4. The earliest recorded instance in the OED of vegetarian, in the sense of someone "who lives wholly or principally upon vegetable foods" and who "on principle abstains from any form of animal food," is 1839. Even Shelley, a devout vegetarian, did not use the term; the title of one of his tracts is On the Vegetable System of Diet. "Herby" and "Hortulan" (as well as "Antediluvian") are terms used by John Evelyn in his vegetarian treatise, Acetaria: a Discourse of Sallets (1699). Although somewhat anachronistic, the word vegetarian is useful in describing a set of cultural practices, both dietary and ethical, for which there was no uniform or commonly accepted term in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
5. S. K. Heninger, Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1974), 58.
6. Beast fables enjoyed great popularity in the late seventeenth century. See Jayne Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651-1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1995).
7. The "Country Banquet" scene, from Dryden's "Baucis and Philemon," translated from Ovid, appears in Fables, 72-121,
8. from Dryden, Works, vol. 7.
9. Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy: Containing the Lives, Opinions, Actions and Discourses of the Philosophers of every Sect [1656-60], 2nd ed. (London, 1687), 555. This is the most exhaustive and encyclopedic history of ideas to appear, in English, in the seventeenth century.
10. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Harcourt, 1993), 332, hereafter referred to as Mandelbaum.
11. See, for example, "To my Honour'd Kinsman": "A Patriot, both the King and Country Serves; / Prerogative, and Privilege preserves" (171-72), also from Fables,
12. in Dryden, Works, vol. 7.
13. Cedric D. Reverand II, Dryden's Final Poetic Mode: The "Fables" (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1988), 168.
14. Reverand stresses the central importance of the Pythagorean doctrine of "perpetual flux" to the rest of Fables (164-84).
15. For commentary on hunting as a central theme of Fables, see Reverand, Dryden's Final Poetic Mode, 37-38, 168-70.
16. On Bernier and Aureng-Zebe, see Dryden, Plays, vol. 12 of The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1994), 385-88. According to Dearing, "Dryden seems to have read Bernier with so deep an interest that a myriad of details sank into the 'deep well' of his mind for later conscious or unconscious use" (397-98).
17. I am quoting from Bernier's Travels in the Mogul Empire A.D. 1656-1668, ed. V. A. Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1916), 326. This work contains exact reprints of the 1671 and 1672 editions of Bernier.
18. "Second Letter" to Monsieur de Merveilles (25 February 1665), Bernier's Travels, 381.
19. John Ovington, A Voyage to Suratt, in the Year, 1689. Giving a large Account of that City, and its Inhabitants, and of the English Factory there (London, 1696), 277.
20. We know little about the relationship of Evelyn and Dryden (who shared many interests), but they did serve on the same committee together for "improving the English Language." See James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale Univ., 1987), 129.
21. See Gillian Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity (New Haven: Yale Univ., 2006), 176.
22. Several scholars have recently treated this aspect of Evelyn. See the two collections of essays: A Celebration of John Evelyn: Proceedings of a Conference to Mark the Tercentenary of His Death, ed. Mavis Batey (Sutton: Surrey Gardens Trust, 2007),
23. and John Evelyn and His Milieu, ed. Frances Harris and Michael Hunter (London: The British Library, 2003).
24. John Evelyn, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (London, 1699), rep. with an introduction by Kit Currie (Newton: Bird and Bull, 1985), 100.
25. Dryden seems to have Evelyn's "greens" in mind when he describes the country fare at the banquet of Baucis and Philemon: "A Garden-Sallad was the third Supply / Of Endive, Radishes, and Succory" (94-95), from Dryden, Works, vol. 7. Evelyn gives instructions on how to prepare each of these garden greens.
26. John Ray, Historia Plantarum Species hactenus editas aliasque insuper multas noviter inventas, 3 vols. (London, 1686-1704), 1:46. The original is in Latin: "Homo certe natura Animal carnivorum non est, nullis ad praedam & rapinam armis instructum, non dentibus exertis & serratis, non unguibus aduncis. Manus ad fructus colligendos, dentes ad mandendos comparati." This passage from Ray's monumental work was so well known that John Evelyn quotes and translates it in his 1699 Acetaria (117). Throughout, I am using Evelyn's translation.
27. Plutarch, "Of Eating of Flesh," Plutarch's Morals: In Five Volumes [1684-94], 5 vols., 4th ed. (London, 1704), 5:1.
28. The language of this observation is very close to Ray's "non dentibus exertis & serratis, non unguibus aduncis" (Historia Plantarum, 1:46).
29. Charles Blount affirms the same point in The First Two Books of Philostratus, Concerning the Life of Apollonius Tyaneus (London, 1680), in commenting on Apollonius, who considered "all those sanguinary Meats too gross and stupefying for the Brain" (3).
30. See Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006).
31. See Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York: Norton, 2007), 146.
32. For more information on Bushell and Crab, see Stuart, Bloodless Revolution, 3-37.
33. See also the informative chapter by Diane Kelsey McColley, "Animal Ethics and Radical Justice," in Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 171-95.
34. Thomas Tryon, Being a Transcript of Several Letters from Averroes . . . Also Several Letters from Pythagoras to the King of India, together with his Reception at the Indian Court, and an Account of his Discourse with the King (London, 1695), 158.
35. Tryon is the author of Pythagoras and his Mystic Philosophy Reviv'd (London, 1691) and many other tracts advocating a meatless diet and kindness toward animals. According to Stuart, Bloodless Revolution, "In his lifetime Tryon was appreciated by a wide range of people, from recondite astrologers to the famous proto-feminist playwright, poet, and novelist Aphra Behn" (63).
36. See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London: Penguin, 1983), 51-70 (on plant classification), 92-120 (on domestic companions), 198-223 (on tree planting), 287-303 (on animal cruelty).
37. See John Bowle, John Evelyn and His World: A Biography (London: Routledge, 1981), 231.
38. For a survey of "vitalist" thinkers and ideas, see Brian Copenhaver, "The Occultist Tradition and Its Critics," The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1998), 1:454-512.
39. Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, trans. and ed. Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1996), 45; see also xxix-xxxiii.
40. Thomas Tryon, Wisdom's Dictates: or, Aphorisms and Rules, Physical, Moral and Divine, for Preserving the Health of the Body, and the Peace of the Mind (London, 1691), 6 (aphorism 41). In aphorism 52, Tryon speaks of the creator as the "Maker and Sustainer of all these wonderful Beings" (7).
41. Nehemiah Grew, The Anatomy of Plants. With an Idea of a Philosophic History of Plants. And several other Lectures Read before the Royal Society (London, 1682), "The Epistle Dedicatory."
42. McColley, Poetry and Ecology. "Hylozoic poems by vitalist or animist materialist poets are literally about plants" and "are concerned with matter of life and the matter of language, and are, in various degrees, organically constructed" (111). McColley is ambivalent about Dryden's status as a vitalist poet (see 136-37).
43. See Graham Perry, "John Evelyn as Hortulan Saint," in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Leicester: Leicester Univ., 1992), 130-50;
44. see also Michael Leslie, "The Spiritual Husbandry of John Beale," in Culture and Cultivation, 151-172.
45. Dryden, Works, 12:113-115 (III.i.).
46. Giovanni Paolo Marana, et al., Letters writ by a Turkish Spy (London, 1691-94).
47. Richard H. Popkin, in Israel and the Nations, ed. Shmuel Almog (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Univ., 1987), has located at least thirty English editions of the Spy dating from 1691 to 1801 (xxix).
48. Alexander Pope, "Against Barbarity to Animals," in Selected Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Paul Hammond (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1987), 48.
49. The Guardian 61 (21 May 1713).
50. Marana appears to have created a new fictional prototype, the foreign observer, which served as the model for later eighteenth-century works like Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721)
51. and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (1760).
52. Marana, Turkish Spy, vol. 6, book 4, letter 4, page 293.
53. Marana, Turkish Spy, vol. 4, book 4, letter 1, page 301.
54. Marana, Turkish Spy, vol. 4, book 1 letter 5, pages 16, 23.
55. Compare Ovid: "primusque animalia mensis / arcuit inponi, primus quoque talibus ora / docta quidem solvit, sed non et credita, verbis: 'Parcite, mortals, dapibus temerare nefandis / corpora!'" (72-76): "He was the first to speak against the use of animals as human food, a practice he denounced with learned but unheeded lips. His words: 'O mortals, don't contaminate your bodies with food procured so sacrilegiously'" (Mandelbaum, 516).
56. Marana, Turkish Spy, vol. 4, book 1, letter 5, page 15.
57. "Why should anyone abstain from animate creatures?" This is the question that Porphyry answers at length in the four books of On Abstinence from Killing Animals, trans. Gillian Clark (London: Duckworth, 2000), 37.
58. Porphyry, in On Abstinence, stresses the same idea: "I think that when friendship and kinship ruled everything, no one killed any creature, because people thought the other animals were related to them" (63)
59. Thyestes, unknowingly, ate his own children, who were slaughtered by his brother Atreus.
60. Quoted by Stuart, Bloodless Revolution, 123.
61. Although other references to Marana, Turkish Spy, use the edition of 1691-94 recorded in note 39, in this case, I have had to rely on a reprint, since my source for the period text, EEBO, is missing some of the Marana material: Marana, Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, ed. Arthur J. Weitzman (New York: Columbia Univ., 1970), vol. 4, book 3, letter 4, pages 93-94.
62. Marana, Turkish Spy, vol. 7, book 3, letter 8, page 197.
63. Compare Ovid: "heu quantum scelus est in viscera viscera condi / congestoque avidum pinguescere corpore corpus / alterius animantem animantis vivere leto! / scilicet in tantis opibus, quas, optima matrum, / terra parit, nil te nisi tritia mandere saevo / vulnera dente iuvat ritusque referre Cyclopum, / nec, nisi perdideris alium, placare voracis, / et male morati poteris ieiunia ventris" (88-95): "Ah, it's a monstrous crime indeed to stuff your innards with a living thing's own innards, to make fat your greedy flesh by swallowing another body, letting another die that you may live. Amid so many things that Earth, the best of mothers, may offer, must you really choose to chew with cruel teeth such wretched, slaughtered flesh - and mime the horrid Cyclops as you eat? Is your voracious, pampered gut appeased by this alone: killing living things?" (Mandelbaum, 516).
64. Compare Ovid's use of repetition: "in viscera viscera condi" (88) and "pinguescere corpore corpus" (89).
65. Marana, Turkish Spy, vol. 4, book 1, letter 5.
66. This is part of a longer Thomas Tyron work entitled Averroeana: Being a Transcript of Several Letters from Averroes (London, 1695).
67. Compare Ovid: "sunt fruges, sunt deducentia ramos / pondere poma suo tumidaeque in vitibus uvae, / sunt herbae dulces, sunt quae mitescere flamma / mollirique queant; nec vobis lacteus umor / eripitur, nec mella thymi redolentia flore: / prodiga divitias alimentaque mitia tellus / suggerit atque epulas sine caede et sanquine praebet" (76-82): "For you can gather grain, and there are fruits that bend the branches with their weight, and grapes that swell in clusters on the vines; there are delicious greens that cooking makes still more inviting, still more tender. You need not refrain from milk, or honey sweet with scent of thyme. The earth is kind - and it provides so much abundance; you are offered feasts for which there is no need to slaughter beasts, to shed their blood" (Mandelbaum, 516).
68. This is in contrast to the largely negative connotations of luxury in the satiric tradition charted by John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought: Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ., 1977).
69. For a positive assessment of luxury as an economic and social good, see Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2005), 21-45.
70. See Michel Jeanneret, "'Ma Salad et Ma Muse': On Renaissance Vegetarianism," in At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Timothy J. Tomasik and Juliann M. Vitullo (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 216.
71. The "distasteful killing of animals" is a phrase borrowed from G. Karl Galinski, Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1975), 141.
72. Marana, Turkish Spy, vol. 4, book 1, letter 5, calls this "revenge" killing of the first sacrificial goat "an Impious Deed, having never been heard of before" (page 18).
73. Samuel Hartlib, "Epistle to the Reader," The Reformed Husband-Man; or a Brief Treatise of the Errors, Defects, and Inconveniencies of our English Husbandry (London, 1651), A2v.
74. Galinski, Ovid's Metamorphoses, considers this episode one of Ovid's main artistic achievements (142).
75. Compare Ovid: "victima labe carens et praestantissima forma / (nam placuisse nocet) vittis insignis et auro / sistitur ante aras auditque ingara precantem / inponique suae videt inter cornua fronti / quas coluit, fruges percussaque sanguine cultros / inficit in liquida praevisos forsitan unda. protinus ereptas viventi pectore fibras / inspiciunt mentesque deum scrutantur in illis" (130-37): "The stainless victim, unblemished and most handsome (too much beauty brings sorrow), all adorned with gilded horns and fillets, is arrayed before the altar and, ignorant of what they mean, must hear the prayers recited; and when they append upon his head, between his horns, the ears of grain that he helped gather, he must stand and wait and watch his executioners. When struck, he stains with his own blood the blade whose flash he may have seen reflected in the clear waters of the temple pool. At once - while he is still alive - they pull the vitals from the victim's chest; and these they scrutinize, to see if they can read the god's intentions" (Mandelbaum, 518).
76. George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures [1632], ed. Karl Hulley (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1970): "Whence springs so dire an appetite in man / To inderdicted food?" (book 15, line 139).
77. Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (London, 1653), 112-13.
78. Pope, "Against Barbarity to Animals," 49. Pope refers to some of the standard authorities in the animal rights tradition (Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch, and Montaigne); he also quotes directly from the passage in the Metamorphoses, book 15, lines 116-24, that condemns the sacrifice of sheep, goats, and oxen.
79. Dryden, "To the Pious Memory of the Accomplisht Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew, Excellent in the two Sister-Arts of Poësie, and Painting. An Ode," (26-27), quoted from Dryden, Poems 1685-1692, ed. Earl Miner and Vinton A. Dearing, vol. 3 of The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1969).
80. See Tristram Stuart, Bloodless Revolution, 86-96, for a discussion of a few unorthodox cabalistic thinkers like the prominent Quaker, George Keith, and his coreligionist, Anne Conway.
81. As a literary motif, the theme of "transformation" is popular in seventeenth-century poetry and drama and in certain works of fiction, like The Blazing World of Margaret Cavendish (1666).
82. John Donne makes jokes about the "transmigration of souls" in such poems as "The Flea" and "Metempsychosis or the Progress of the Soul." Thomas Brown treats it as an erroneous, although ancient, doctrine in Hydriotaphia: Urn Burial (1658).
83. Compare Ovid: "corpora, quae possint animas habuisse parentum / aut fratrum aut aliquo iunctorum foedere nobis / aut hominem certe, tuta esse et honesta sinamus / neve Thyesteis cumulemus viscera mensis!" (459-62): "And so, let us respect - leave whole, intact - all bodies where our parents' souls or those of brothers or of others dear to us may well have found a home; let us not stuff our bellies banqueting, as did Thyestes" (Mandelbaum, 531).
84. Compare Ovid: "quem se parat ille cruori / inpius humano, vituli qui guttura ferro / rumpit et inmotas praebet mugitibus aures / aut qui vagitus similes puerilibus haedum / edentem iugulare potest" (463-67): "Who ever cuts a calf's throat with a knife and listens, without pity, to its cries; whoever kills a kid that, like a child, wails loud . . . profanely sheds the blood of humans" (Mandelbaum, 531).
85. See Joshua Poole, The English Parnassus (1677), 59,
86. quoted by Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 294.
87. It was hard, apparently, even for professed admirers of Pythagoras, to practice the master's precepts. Seneca, for example, kept to a meat-free diet for only one year, but gave it up, even though he found the regimen "pleasant" and "easy." See "On the Approaches to Philosophy," Epistles, trans. and ed. R. Gummere, The Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols. (1925; rep. Cambridge: Harvard Univ., 1962), 3:243 (letter 108).