PORPHYRY ON

ABSTINENCE FROM THE EATING

OF ANIMALS

BOOK ONE.

A decorative floral vignette or ornament featuring symmetrical scrolling foliage and blossoms.

An ornate woodcut initial 'C' depicting a bearded scholar in academic robes sitting at a desk, writing in a large volume with a quill. He is surrounded by shelves of books and other instruments of study.WHEN I had heard from those who were coming from your region to us, that you, having renounced your abstinence from flesh, had returned again to the eating of meat: at first I did not believe it, taking into account both your temperance original: "temperantiæ" — a core Platonic virtue involving self-restraint and moderation and the piety with which we followed those ancient and God-fearing men who had handed these traditions down to us. But after others, arriving subsequently, confirmed the same thing to me: if I had wished to rebuke you—noting that you had neither, as the proverb says, "fled the evil and found the better," nor, like Empedocles A Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher who famously advocated for vegetarianism based on the belief in the transmigration of souls, having lamented your former life, returned to a better one—it seemed to me to be both unrefined and far from the persuasion of reason. But if I had uncovered your errors through the refutation of an argument, and made manifest from what state into what state you had fallen...