Scope and Contents The print by Ron Costley illustrates the poem Porphyry, "On Abstinence From Animal Food," which has been translated by Thomas Taylor. This print commemorates the philosophy of Porphyry 233-304 whose original name was Malchus who was a Greek Neo-Platonist philosopher, born in Syria; disciple and biographer of Plotinus. He was a proponent of vegetarianism, e.g., "But to deliver animals to be slaughtered and cooked, and thus be filled with murder, not for the sake of nutriment and satisfying the wants of nature, but making pleasure and gluttony the end of such conduct, is transcendently iniquitous and dire. He who abstains from anything animate ... will be much more careful not to injure those of his own species. For he who loves the genus will not hate any species of animals. And is it not absurd, since we see that many of our own species live from sense alone, but do not possess intellect and reason; and since we also see that many of them surpass the most terrible of wild beasts...

Scope and Contents The print by Ron Costley illustrates the poem Porphyry, "On Abstinence From Animal Food," which has been translated by Thomas Taylor. This print commemorates the philosophy of Porphyry 233-304 whose original name was Malchus who was a Greek Neo-Platonist philosopher, born in Syria; disciple and biographer of Plotinus. He was a proponent of vegetarianism, e.g., "But to deliver animals to be slaughtered and cooked, and thus be filled with murder, not for the sake of nutriment and satisfying the wants of nature, but making pleasure and gluttony the end of such conduct, is transcendently iniquitous and dire. He who abstains from anything animate ... will be much more careful not to injure those of his own species. For he who loves the genus will not hate any species of animals. And is it not absurd, since we see that many of our own species live from sense alone, but do not possess intellect and reason; and since we also see that many of them surpass the most terrible of wild beasts...