mind, and exempting it from all anxious cares; esteeming the troublesome and solicitous thoughts about past and future, to be like so many dreams, and no more to be regarded. They despised both life and death, pleasure and pain, or at least thought them perfectly indifferent. Their justice was exact and exemplary; their temperance so great, that they lived on rice and herbs, and upon nothing that had sensitive life. If they fell sick, they counted it such a mark of intemperance, that they would frequently die out of shame and sullenness; but many lived a hundred and fifty, and some two hundred years."
It appears from the Mosaic records, that for more than 1600 years, even till after the deluge, mankind lived on vegetable food only; they exercised a gentle dominion over the brute creation, and did not use their flesh for food. They had indeed a prescribed regimen. "Every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree, yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat."—Genesis i, 29. That nothing but vegetable food was eaten before the flood, appears from the command to Noah, relating to provisions to be laid up in the ark. "And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them. Gen. vi. 21. The ancient Greeks lived entirely on the fruits of the earth.—See Porphyrius de Abstinentia, book 4, par. 2. The ancient Syrians abstained from every species of animal food.—See ibid. b. 4, par, 15. By the laws of Triptolemus, the Athenians were strictly commanded to abstain from all living creatures.—See Porphyr. Even so late as the days of Draco, the Attic oblations consisted only of the fruits of the earth.—See Potter's Antiquities of Greece, vol. i. p. 188
