Pythagoras was one of the first people in Western history to abstain from eating meat for moral reasons. Eating the dead, he taught his followers, polluted the body—and so they must never kill a living thing.His rules were a bit weird, though. You might remember that we mentioned earlier his sacrifice of oxen—and, yes, he did both. Like a vegan who eats fish and chicken, Pythagorean vegetarianism had some weird loopholes.”The offerings he made were always inanimate,” the Greek writer Diogenes wrote in a biography of Pythagoras. Then Diogenes clarified: “Though some say that he would offer cocks, sucking goats, and porkers.” Still, Pythagoras drew the line somewhere. “But lambs,” Diogenes explained, “Never!”Pythagoras’s rules seemed every bit as weird to the Greeks as they do to us. During his time, the Greeks spread a joke about a Pythagorean who insisted that he never ate any living thing. After getting caught eating dog meat, the Pythagorean said, “Yes, but [I kill] them first, and so they are still not alive.”
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