As MPs prepare yet another raft of vital legislation relating to killer dogs, no, sorry, gun-control, no, ah yes, of course, the obesity ‘epidemic’ (or was it anorexia? no, that was a year or so back), they might do well to read what Plutarch (c.ad 110) has to say on the general issue.
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David Butterfield
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In one of his ‘Table Talks’, Plutarch and friends are trying to work out whether brand new diseases could come into the world — as some doctors claimed — and if so, how: from other worlds, or what? The general conclusion reached is that, just as the facts of any case might allow one true statement to be made, but an infinite number of false ones, so nature, representing order and all that is good, can be knocked out of kilter and thus generate disease by the sheer number of combinations of circumstances that are possible (and here, by way of analogy, Plutarch quotes Xenocrates’ calculation that the number of syllables that the letters of the alphabet could in theory make comes to 1,002,000,000,000).
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