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Animal Rights History Timeline » [BCE-CE] Antiquity » Marcus Tullius Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Letter to M. Marius

[55 BCE] Cicero, "Letter to M. Marius," in Letters, translated by E. S. Shuckburgh. Vol. IX, Part 3 of The Harvard Classics (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909-14); Online at Bartleby).

If some bodily pain or weakness of health has prevented your coming to the games, I put it down to fortune rather than your own wisdom: but if you have made up your mind that these things which the rest of the world admires are only worthy of contempt, and, though your health would have allowed of it, you yet were unwilling to come, then I rejoice at both facts—that you were free from bodily pain, and that you had the sound sense to disdain what others causelessly admire.

There remain the two wild-beast hunts, lasting five days, magnificent—nobody denies it—and yet, what pleasure can it be to a man of refinement, when either a weak man is torn by an extremely powerful animal, or a splendid animal is transfixed by a hunting spear?

The last day was that of the elephants, on which there was a great deal of astonishment on the part of the vulgar crowd, but no pleasure whatever. Nay, there was even a certain feeling of compassion aroused by it, and a kind of belief created that that animal has something in common with mankind.

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"The agonized trumpetings," often quoted as part of Cicero's letter above, are actually related by Pliny in his Natural History.