Robert·ology

We’ll round off some of the history for now with what was probably the first intentional “vegetarian society” of sorts.

Think back to high school geometry and you may recall Pythagoras. Yes, the a² + b² = c² guy. Well, back around the end of the 6th century BC he and his inner circle of scholars and philosophers adopted a vegetarian way of life.

The Pythagorean diet came to mean an avoidance of the flesh of slaughtered animals. Pythagorean ethics first became a philosophical morality between 490-430 BC with a desire to create a universal and absolute law including injunctions not to kill “living creatures,” to abstain from “harsh-sounding bloodshed,” in particular animal sacrifice, and “never to eat meat.”

from a review of The Heretics Feast by Colin Spencer

So Pythagorean was the word for vegetarian before the v-word was created over 2,000 years later. Looks like this guy was no “one theorem wonder.”

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Veg. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.