‘Of course I have objections,’ replied Solon. ‘I have no [Sidenote: B] wish to be thought a poorer judge than the Egyptians. After cutting open a dead body, they take out the entrails and expose them to the sunlight. They then throw those parts into the river and proceed to attend to the rest of the body, which is now regarded as purified. Yes, therein in truth lies the pollution of our flesh. It is its Tartarus—like that in Hades—full of “dreadful streams”, a confused medley of wind and fire and of dead things. For while itself lives, nothing that feeds it can be alive. We commit the wrong of murdering animate things and of destroying plants, which can claim to have life through the fact that they feed and grow. I say destroying, because [Sidenote: C] anything that changes from what nature has made it into something else, is destroyed; it must perish utterly in order to become the other’s sustenance. To abstain from eating flesh, as we are told Orpheus did in ancient times, is more a quibble than an avoidance of crime in the matter of food. The only way of avoiding it, and the only way of attaining to justice by a complete purification, is to become self-sufficing and free of external needs. If God has made it impossible for a thing to secure its own preservation without injury to another, He has also endowed it with the principle of injustice in the shape of its own nature. Would it not, therefore, be a good thing, my dear friend, if, when cutting out injustice, we could cut out the belly, the gullet, and the liver, which impart to us no perception [Sidenote: D] of anything noble and no appetite for it, but partly resemble the utensils for cooking butcher’s meat—such as choppers and stew-pans—and partly the apparatus for a bakery—ovens, water-tanks, and kneading-troughs? Indeed, in the case of most [Sidenote: *] people you can see their soul shut up in their body as if in a baker’s mill, and perpetually going round and round at the business of getting food. Take ourselves, for example. Just now we were neither looking at nor listening to one another, but we all had our heads down, slaving at the business of feeding. But now that the tables have been removed, we have—as you perceive—become free, and with garlands on our heads we are [Sidenote: E] engaged in sociable and leisurely conversation together, because we have arrived at the state of not requiring food. Well then, if the state in which we now find ourselves remains as a permanence all our lives, shall we not be at perpetual leisure to enjoy each other’s society? We shall have no fear of poverty. Nor shall we know the meaning of wealth, since the quest for luxuries is but the immediate consequence and concomitant of the use of necessaries.