The penalty for stealing silk is to become a partridge, for stealing linen a frog, for stealing vegetables a peacock, for stealing cooked food a porcupine, for stealing uncooked food a hedgehog, and for stealing molasses a flying-fox. And so on for the various degrees of moral turpitude throughout the entire range of the animal kingdom.(899) Buddha himself, who gave an immense extension to the doctrine of transmigration by incorporating it in his religious or rather philosophical system, is traditionally said to have undergone many animal births of various sorts before he attained to his supreme dignity. Thus it is reported that he was once a hare, once a dog, twice a pig, twice a frog, four times a serpent, six times a snipe, ten times a lion, eleven times a deer, and eighteen times a monkey; to say nothing of having been once a devil-dancer, twice a thief, eighty-three times an ascetic, and so on.(900) (M220) In ancient Greece also the theory of the transmigration of souls found favour with the early philosophers Pythagoras and Empedocles, both of whom, if we may trust tradition, appealed to their own personal experience in support of the doctrine. According to ancient writers, Pythagoras affirmed that he had been Euphorbus the Trojan in one of his former lives, and in proof of the assertion he identified the shield of Euphorbus among the Trojan spoils at Mycenae.(901) He would seem to have held that human souls can transmigrate into animals or even into plants;(902) and we may suppose that the possibility of such transmigrations was at least one of the reasons he alleged for enjoining the strictest of his disciples neither to kill nor to eat animals and to abstain from certain vegetables, such as beans and mallows.(903) Certainly at a later time these principles were maintained and these precepts inculcated by Empedocles, who outdid the reminiscences of his predecessor by asserting that he himself in former lives had been a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird, and a fish.(904) Hence he denounced as a crime the practice of killing and eating animals, since according to him a man could never know but that in slaughtering and eating an animal he might be murdering and devouring one of his dead kinsfolk, it might be his father or mother, his son or daughter.(905) Thus from the doctrine of transmigration Empedocles logically drew the same practical conclusion as the savage, who abstains, for example, from killing and eating crocodiles or pigs because he believes the souls of his departed relations to be embodied in crocodiles or pigs: the only important difference between the savage and the philosopher in this respect is that, whereas the savage venerates and spares only animals of one particular species on the ground of their possible affinity to himself, the philosopher on his own shewing was bound to abstain from all animals whatever, since according to him the spirits of his deceased relatives might be lurking in creatures of any species.