Cicero’s more virile mind would have spurned this craving to renounce the distinguishing human privilege for the bliss of ignorance. Wherever we fix the limits of animal intelligence, there is no question of man’s obligation to treat sentient creatures with humanity. This was recognised by Marcus Aurelius when he wrote the golden precept: “As to animals which have no reason ... do thou, since thou hast reason, and they have none, make use of them with a generous and liberal spirit.” Here we have the broadest application of the narrowest assumption. From the time, at least, that Rome was full of Greek teachers, there were always some partisans of a different theory altogether. What Seneca calls “the illustrious but unpopular school of Pythagoras” had a little following which made up by its sincere enthusiasm for the fewness of its members. Seneca’s own master Sotio was of this school, and his teaching made a deep impression on the most illustrious of his pupils, who sums up its chief points with his usual lucidity: Pythagoras gave men a horror of crime and of parricide by telling them that they might unawares kill or devour their own fathers; all sentient beings are bound together in a universal kinship and an endless transmutation causes them to pass from one form to another; no soul perishes or ceases its activity save in the moment when it changes its envelope. Sotio took for granted that the youths who attended his classes came to him with minds unprepared to receive these doctrines, and he aimed more at making them accept the consequences of the theory than the theory itself. What if they believed none of it? What if they did not believe that souls passed through different bodies and that the thing we call death is a transmigration? That in the animal which crops the grass or which peoples the sea, a soul resides which once was human? That, like the heavenly bodies, every soul traverses its appointed circle? That nothing in this world perishes, but only changes scene and place? Let them remember, nevertheless, that great men have believed all this: “Suspend your judgment, and in the meantime, respect whatever has life.” If the doctrine be true, then to abstain from animal flesh is to spare oneself the committal of crimes; if it be false, such abstinence is commendable frugality; “all you lose is the food of lions and vultures.”