Animal Rights History »» Howard Williams

, The Ethics of Diet, "Musonius"

A STOIC writer, of great repute with his contemporaries, son of a Roman Eques, was born at Volsinii (Bolsena), in Etruria, at the end of the reign of Augustus. He was banished by Nero, who especially hated the professor of the Porch, on the pretext of his association in the conspiracy of Piso—the charge on which Seneca was condemned to death. But by Vespasian he was held in extraordinary honour, when the rest of the philosophers were expelled from Rome. The time of his death is uncertain. He was the author of various philosophical works characterised by Suïdas as "distinguished writings of a highly philosophic nature," who also attributes to him (but on uncertain evidence) letters to Apollonius of Tyana. We are indebted for knowledge of his opinions to a work (of unknown authorship) entitled Memoirs of Musonius the Philosopher. It is from this work that Stobæus (Anthologion), Aulus Gellius, Arrian, and others seem to have borrowed in quoting the dicta of the great Stoic teacher. The fragments, as has been said by one of his critics, are, "full of pure morality and wisdom."

Although his great merits, for the most part, have been almost wholly overlooked by modern critics, this admirable writer of the better Stoic school, claims a place second only to Seneca in the literature of the Porch. While the Encheiridion ("Hand-Book") of his celebrated pupil, the ex-slave Epiktêtus, always has been the object of unbounded [Page 94] eulogy of every critic, the yet more meritorious—because more objective and practical—philosophy of the Master seems to have been regarded with comparative indifference.^* Yet no Latin writer, the author of the De Clenzentiâ and the De Vitâ Beatâ excepted, had clearer or profounder conceptions of some of the leading principles of the higher morality than Musonius Rufus.

A younger contemporary of Seneca, among his friends he numbered Thrasea Pæ✓tus and Soranus, who live in the pages of Tacitus. Sent into exile by Nero, to the island of Gyarus in the Ægean sea, he attracted to that barren rock many hearers by the fame of his superior discourses. Recalled from banishment at the fall of the tyrant, he acted as mediator between the opposing pretenders to the empire during that terrible period when Rome, ravaged by the alternate victors, seemed to be on the point of perishing in the universal conflagration, a period of sturm und drang which inspired that most terrific production in all literature—the Johannine Apokalypsis. Under Vespasian and his son Titus, Musonius enjoyed honour and respect and held some official post. He died, probably, in the early part of the reign of Trajan, at the beginning of the second century.

For all knowledge of his writings, the moderns are indebted to the Anthology of the Greek Stobu0;s, who, also, deserves the greatest gratitude of the modern world of readers for his preservation of many parts of Euripides and of Menandros. Suïdas, the lexicographer, states that Musonius left several treatises, the loss of which is much to be lamented. The distinguishing character of his teaching was an insistence on the indivisible unity of knowledge and wisdom, or in other words, of theory and practice in any philosophical system worthy of the name. Not, like the vast majority of (so-called) philosophers, content with the jargon of the schools—mere dialectics or word-disputes—he protested that the knowledge which was not applied to the improvement of ethics and of the [Page 95] [Page 96] [Page 97]

Howard Williams, The Ethics of Diet, A Cantena [First Edition:] (London & Manchester, 1883); The Ethics of Diet, A Biographical History of the Literature of Human Dietetics, From the Earliest Period to the Present Day, [2nd Edition Expanded and Revised:] (Manchester & London, 1896); [Abridged Edition:] (London & Manchester, 1907); The Ethics of Diet, A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of Flesh Eating with a Introduction by Carol Adams [Fascimile Reprint of the 1st Edition with an Appendix of Additions from the 2nd Edition]( University of Illinois, 1995); [Online Edition, transcribed from the 2nd edition of 1896] (Animal Rights History, 2006).

"Now we can join Gandhi and Tolstoy and nameless others who encountered this vigorous and invigorating book. Welcome to a company of radicals who believed we could and should stop eating non-human animals. They brought vegetarianism out of history and into the here and now."—from the introduction by Carol Adams.