Beasts
animal · 6 works · 6 mentions · 7 anchored passages
beasts · Bears · Beasts grown fat · bulls and lions · the North · the beasts · wild beasts
spoken of as
1 expressionthe beasts1 mention
On Moral Ends (Latin)
let us concede pleasure to the beasts, whom you are wont to use as witnesses about the highest good.
in the texts
On Moral Ends
Non-human animals discussed as examples in the debate over whether pleasure is the highest good
let us concede pleasure to the beasts, whom you are wont to use as witnesses about the highest good.
Shall there be, then, in the beasts certain likenesses of the human virtues, severed from pleasure, and shall there be in men themselves no virtue except for the sake of pleasure?
We, indeed, if everything is in pleasure, are by far and greatly surpassed by the beasts, to whom the earth itself pours forth from itself various and abundant feed while they toil not at all;
Panathenaicus
Animals invoked as the object of humanity's common struggle against savagery.
for they were as firmly resolved to keep their hands off the states of Hellas as were the devout to abstain from the treasures stored up in the temples of the gods, conceiving that, second only to the war which we carry on in alliance with all mankind against the savagery of the beasts, that war is the most necessary and the most righteous which we wage in alliance with the Hellenes against the ba …
Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated
A hypothetical society of beasts imagined as forming a government, used as an allegorical device to test the tyranny of restricting natural comforts to benefit a privileged few.
Had beasts established a government among themselves, to protect each individual in the exertion of his own skill and industry, in gathering the fruits of the forest, and this government should have passed laws to prevent the majority of beasts form eating clover and cherries, and confining them to broom straw and blackberries, that a few might indulge in the most delicious fruits;
On Providence
Fattened, inactive beasts cited as an animal example of how ease produces weakness rather than strength.
" Beasts grown fat through inactivity grow sluggish, and fail not only from labour but from their own movement and the mere weight of their bulk.
Ad Nationes
Wild animals used both as an instrument of infant exposure and as arena opponents demonstrating contempt of death.
If for some woman there is a famous death from beasts, in the midst of peace, daily, of your own free will, you go to the beasts.
For though we do it in one way, yet not otherwise are you too infanticides — you who slay your infants once born, forbidden indeed by laws, but no laws are eluded so much, so safely, with the connivance of all, by the tablets of a single age.
Scorpiace
Wild animals invoked, via zodiacal constellations, as instruments of execution in the satirical heavenly persecution scenario.
if to be finished by beasts, the North will send forth the Bears, the zodiac its bulls and lions.