Rome
Singer writes that animals, along with criminals and other undesirables, largely fell outside the Roman moral sphere. He quotes a description from the historian W.E.H. Lecky of the Roman games, first held in 366 BCE:
very variety of atrocity was devised to stimulate flagging interest. At one time, a bear and a bull, chained together, rolled in fierce combat across the sand ... Four hundred bears were killed in a single day under Caligula ... Under Nero, four hundred tigers fought with bulls and elephants. In a single day, at the dedication of the Colosseum by Titus, five thousand animals perished. Under Trajan ... lions, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, bulls, stags, even crocodiles and serpents were employed to give novelty to the spectacle ... So intense was the craving for blood, that a prince was less unpopular if he neglected the distribution of corn than if he neglected the games.
Meat eating was a status symbol, and animals were often cooked alive; Ryder writes that pigs were skewered alive on hot spits to improve the taste. He writes that there were nevertheless signs of tender feelings for animals in the poetry of Virgil (70–19 BCE), Lucretius (99–55 BCE), and Ovid (43 BCE–17). The statesman Seneca (4 BCE–65) was a vegetarian and said that he found the practice not only moral but delightful, as were the philosophers Plutarch (46–120), Plotinus (205–270), and Porphyry (232–305). Porphyry wrote two tracts on the issue, De Abstinentia (On Abstinence) and De Non Necandis ad Epulandum Animantibus (On the Impropriety of Killing Living Beings for Food). Plutarch, who was Greek but lived in Rome, argued strongly against meat eating, seeing it as responsible for much of the cruelty in the world:
For the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light ... And then we fancy that the voices it utters and screams forth to us are nothing else but certain inarticulate sounds and noises, and not the ... entreaties ... of each of them ...
Read more about this topic: Moral Status Of Animals In The Ancient World
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