han from other animals. For this is said of the ancient
Pythagoreans; and even now I have met with Alexicrates's scholars, who
will eat and kill and even sacrifice some of the other animals, but will
never taste fish. Tyndares the Spartan said, they spared fish because
they had so great a regard for silence, and they called fish [Greek
omitted], because they had their voice SHUT UP ([Greek omitted]); and my
namesake Empedocles advised one who had been expelled from the school of
Pythagoras to shut up his mind like a fish, and they thought silence to
be divine, since the gods without any voice reveal their meaning to the
wise by their works.

Then Lucius gravely and composedly saying, that perhaps the true reason
was obscure and not to be divulged, yet they had liberty to venture upon
probable conjectures, Theon the grammarian began thus: To demonstrate
that Pythagoras was a Tuscan is a great and no easy task. But it is
confessed that he conversed a long time with the wise men of Egypt, and
imitated a great many of the rites and institutions of the priests, for
instance, that about beans. For Herodotus delivers, that the Egyptians
neither set nor eat beans, nay, cannot endure to see them; and we all
know, that even now the priests eat no fish; and the stricter sort eat
no salt, and refuse all meat that is seasoned with it. Various reasons
are offered for this; but the only true reason is hatred to the sea, as
being a disagreeable, or rather naturally a destructive element to man.
For they do not imagine that the gods, as the Stoics did that the stars,
were nourished by it. But, on the contrary, they think that the father
and preserver of their country, whom they call the deflux of Osiris,
is lost in it; and when they bewail him as born on the left hand, and
destroyed in the right-hand parts, they intimate to us the ending and
corruption of their Nile by the sea, and therefore they do not believe
that its water is wholesome, or that any creature produced or nourished
in it can be clean or wholesome food for man, since it breathes not the
common air, and feeds not on the same food with him. And the air that
nourisheth and preserves all other things is destructive to them, as
if their production and life were unnecessary and against Nature;
nor should we wonder that they think animals bred in the sea to be
disagreeable to their bodies, and not fit to mix with their blood
and spirits, since when they meet a pilot they will no