על המידות הטובות כ״הOn the Virtues 25
א׳
1[125] This is his legislation about compatriots and foreigners, about friends and enemies, about slaves and free and mankind in general. But he carries on the idea of moderation and gentleness to the sphere of irrational animals, and grants them, too, a draught of goodness, as from a sweet and grateful spring.
ב׳
2[126] He bids them in dealing with the domestic kinds, sheep, goats and oxen, to abstain from availing themselves of their young, by taking them at once either for food or on the grounds of offering them for sacrifice. For he considered that it showed a cruel soul to be lying in wait for the newly born in order to separate instantly mothers and offspring, just to please the belly but still more displease and horrify the soul by so unnatural a meal.
ג׳
3[127] He says then to him, whose life would conform to his most holy commonwealth, “Good Sir, food for your enjoyment to which no blame can attach you have in abundance. Otherwise such an action might perhaps be pardonable, since poverty and dearth compel us to do many things which we would not. But your duty is to excel in self-restraint and the other virtues, stationed as you are in the most honourable of posts, captained by nature’s right reason, for whose sake you must learn gentleness and admit no brutality into your mind.”
ד׳
4[128] And what could be more brutal than to bring in from outside other pangs to add to the pangs of travail by separating the mothers straightway from their offspring. For if they are snatched away, the mothers are bound to be in great distress, because of the maternal affection natural to them, particularly at the time of motherhood, when the breasts, whose flowing fountain is obstructed through lack of its suckling, grow indurated and strained by the weight of the milk coagulated within them and suffer a painful oppression.
ה׳
5[129] “Make a present,” he continues, “of the child to its mother, if not for all time, to be suckled, at least, for the seven first days and do not render useless the fountain which nature has rained into the breasts by destroying the second of the boons which her grace distributes, boons prepared by the profound forethought in which with everlasting and consummate wisdom she looks into the distant sequence of events.
ו׳
6[130] Her first gift was birth, through which the non-existent is brought into existence, and the second is the efflux of milk, the happily timed aliment which flows so gently fostering the tender growth of every creature. It is at once food and drink, for the watery part of milk is drink, and its denser part food, both provided that the newly born should not suffer from the need, which, never far off, seizes it at different times, but with both kinds of nourishment applied in the same single form should at once escape those bitter mistresses, hunger and thirst.”
ז׳
7[131] Read this law, you good and highly prized parents, and hide your faces for shame, you who ever breathe slaughter against your infants, who mount your wicked watch over them as they leave the womb, waiting to cast them away, you deadly enemies of the whole human race.
ח׳
8[132] For to whom will you have any feeling of kindliness, you the murderers of your own children, who do what you can to make a desolation of cities and begin the destruction with your own flesh and blood, who overturn the statutes of nature and demolish all that she builds, who in the cruelty of your savage and ferocious souls arm dissolution to fight against generation and death against life?
ט׳
9[133] Can you not see that our all-excellent lawgiver was at pains to insure that even in the case of irrational animals, the offspring should not be separated from their mother so long as it is being suckled? Still more for your sake, good sirs, was that order given, that if nature does not, instruction may teach you the duty of family love. Learn it from the sight of lambs and kids, who are not hindered from feasting on abundant supplies of what they need. Nature has provided this abundance in places best suited for the purpose, where those who require it will easily find means of enjoyment, while the lawgiver greatly careful for the future looks to see that none interferes with the gifts of God, which bring welfare and safety.