Plutarch, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The dialogue is comic in its form because the thesis is unpopular, and for no other reason. Plato used Aristophanes' manner for the same purpose. A man who has been turned into a pig and who out-argues Ulysses, the very type of human cunning, is a way of getting a hearing for something the schools had closed their ears to. Whether the pig is permitted to win is a question about the frame.
Whether he wins honestly is a question about the evidence, and the evidence is plain. Gryllus begins by refusing the cure. Ulysses offers to restore the Greeks to their shape, and Gryllus answers that he is like a child who fears the physician's dose and hates school, though the medicine would make him healthy.1 That reversal is the comedy. But watch what he does next.
He does not rest on paradox. He proposes to test the virtues men claim for themselves against the beasts, and he begins with the Cyclops' land, which bears everything unploughed, against stony Ithaca, which yields a scanty return for great labour.2 The argument runs on observation of how creatures live. The observation is where my own view lies, and I make it more soberly elsewhere.
The things men acquire in the midst of their luxury, the animals reach by quickness of apprehension: whelps that learn to walk on their hind feet, colts that practise figure-dances, crows that speak, horses and bulls that lie down and dance upon the stage, which, though of little use, are great arguments of docility.3 Then comes the sharper point.
We do not merely learn arts, we teach them. Partridges teach their young to lie upon their backs beneath a clod to escape the fowler; the old storks drill their fledglings upon the housetops; nightingales taken young from the nest sing worse for want of their instructors.3 A creature that instructs and is instructed has memory, purpose and the shape of reason.
The difference between beasts, Gryllus says, is one of degree, as it is between man and man. The stupidity of the sheep is the measure of the fox's and the bee's quickness, as you would compare yourself with Polyphemus, or Autolycus with the Corinthian in Homer.3 This is the Academy's own principle that reason admits of more and less, set against the Stoic view that it is wholly present in man and wholly absent in the beast.
It is no sophist's trick. When I argue it in my own voice, in the treatise on land and sea creatures, I give the list the philosophers use: purpose, contrivance, memory, the passions, care of the young, gratitude for kindness, the remembrance of injuries, the search for what is needful, and visible signs of fortitude, society, continence and magnanimity.4
And I give the instances: the elephant that wears down one tusk on the trees and keeps the other sharp for its defence, the lion that walks with claws drawn in so the hunter cannot trace him, the ichneumon that armours itself in mud like a soldier before it meets the crocodile.4 Here no pig is arguing. I am setting out what any man may see. The attack on flesh-eating follows from the same root, but its ground is what the eater becomes, which is not quite a question of what the beast is owed.
Autobulus traces the descent. Men first learned to watch wild beasts bleed without remorse, then to rejoice in the killing. So the Thirty at Athens set apart one sycophant for death, then a second, then a third, until they had come to the best citizens. So the first man who slew a bear won applause, and the ox and the hog followed, and then the goose and the pigeon, man's own household creatures, killed not for hunger but to indulge appetite.5
The habit made the temper savage and rendered the disposition inflexible to pity. The Pythagoreans, who wished men to love humanity, therefore insisted on gentleness toward beasts, because custom is the strongest thing to carry the affections from moderation to extremity.5 That is Platonic in the plainest sense: it is about the ordering of the soul, in which pity is a part that can be trained or wasted.
So the answer is that the pig does not win by leave. The thesis is Platonic, the evidence is the kind that persuades, and the conclusion about the table concerns the man who sits at it. Ulysses is right to be nervous about allowing reason to creatures that know no god; the dialogue leaves his objection standing and does not answer it, and I do not pretend that it does.
Animals reason, imperfectly as children do but truly: the dog that tracks by elimination reasons, the elephant that practises its dance at night reasons, the ants that bury their dead and the dolphins that love men show virtue without instruction. They feel, they remember, they choose. Men first ate flesh from necessity, when the earth gave nothing, and we eat it from habit and luxury, killing creatures that beg for their lives with their eyes, and we blunt ourselves to pity in doing so.
Pythagoras and Empedocles said the soul passes into beasts; whether or not that is so, the cruelty is certain and the appetite is not an argument.678
like children that are frightened at physician's doses and hate going to school, although the medicines and the precepts make them healthy and learned of diseased and foolsEssays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 5
Now which do you prefer, this country, or your own goat-feeding stony Ithaca, which being cultivated with great labor and hardship, yet answers the expectations of the husbandmen with only a mean and scanty return?Essays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 5
For partridges teach their young ones to hide themselves by lying upon their backs just before a clod of earth, to escape the pursuit of the fowlers.Essays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 5
purpose, contrivance, memory, passions, care of their young ones, gratefulness to those from whom they receive kindnesses, and the remembrance of shrewd turnsEssays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 5
This gave strength and vigor to whatever was in nature bloodthirsty and savage, and rendering the disposition of man inflexible to pity, had almost erased out of his breast whatever was inclinable to humanity and mildness.Essays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 5
And what wonder is it, when it is accounted more noble for a man to kill than to buy a wild boar, a hart, a goat, or a hare, but more honorable to buy a tunny, a lobster, or an amy, than to kill one? And therefore, because there is nothing in fishing that is noble, no using of gins and slight of cunning, it is accounted a sorry, pitiful exercise, not worth a man's labor. 10.Essays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 5
And therefore, as brutes can extend no act of justice to us, so neither can we commit any act of injustice against them. Which argument they who reject have left us no benefit of life, nor any the smallest entrance for justice into the world. 7. AUTOBULUS. These things, dear friend, you utter as the opinion of those people.Essays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 5
So that, whatever men acquire and contemplate in the midst of their luxury and wantonness, those things our understanding attains to through the excellency of our apprehensions, even contrary to the nature of the body. For not to speak of whelps that learn to draw dry foot, and colts that will practise figure-dances; there are crows that will speak, and dogs that will leap through hoops as they turn around.Essays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 5
The position that made him the ancestor of animal ethics, and the one most often read as a rhetorical display because it is made through a pig.