Viewing Trauma in Plutarch

This chapter investigates Plutarch’s On Flesh- Eating. This work, which contains two logoi, is traditionally taken as a highly rhetorical and ‘youthful’ piece which reflects Plutarch’s views on animal welfare and vegetarianism. This chapter argues that it investigates the ways in which one views another’s pain: it uses the torture of animals and our capacity to imagine this to interrogate questions about human society. On Flesh-Eating presents man as someone whose sensory organs and capacity for imagining another’s pain have been undermined by constant exposure to violence and inappropriate sights. Plutarch sets out to remedy this by forcing the reader to confront the distressing elements of animal consumption and, in so doing, to come to imagine the pain of the ultimate ‘other’.