Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1884 — Lambs, Roast Pig, and Plagiarism. [ARTICLE]

Lambs, Roast Pig, and Plagiarism.

Respecting the origin of Charles Lamb’s "Dissertation on Boast Fig,” “C. C. M.” writes to Notes and Queries : Nearly every one is familiar with thi« ludicrous dissertation. But how many are aware that the diverting account there given of the origin of eating roasted flesh is identical in substance with that quoted by Porphyry in his treatise “On Abstinence from Animal Food?” The passage (quoting from Thomas Taylor’s translation) is as follows: “Asclepiades," in his treatise concerning Cyprus and Phoenicia, relates : In the first place, they did not sacrifice anything animate to the gods. They are said, however, on a certain oocasion, in which one soul was required for another, to have for the first time sacrificed a victim, and the whole of the victim was then consumed by fire. But afterward, when the victim was burned, a portion of the flesh fell on- the earth, which was taken by the priest, who, in so doing, having burned his fingers, involuntarily moved them to his month, as a remedy for the pain which the burning produced. Having thus tasted of the roasted flesh, he also desired to eat abundantly of it,and could not refrain from giving some of it to his wife. Pygmalion, becoming acquainted with this circumstance, ordered both the priest and his wife to be hurled headlong from a steep rock, and gave the priesthood to another person, who, not long afterward performing the same sacrifice and eating the flesh of the victim, fell into the same calamities as his predecessor. The thing, however, proceeding still further, and men using the same kind of sacrifice, and through yielding to a desire, not abstaining from, but feeding on flesh, the deed was no longer punished.” Taylor’s translation of Porphyry’s treatise was published in 1823, and we learn from Barry Cornhill’s “Memoir” of Lamb that the “Essays of Elia” (among which is the “Dissertation on Boast Pig”), appeared in the London Magazine between the month of August, 1820, and November, 1824. It seems, therefore, not unfair to conclude that the above coincidence was in fact an adaptation—if plagiarism is too grave a word to apply to it.