The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [A] I must not overlook the amusing way of sitting on [C] his mule [A] adopted by a certain Master Pierre Pol, Doctor of Theology. Monstrelet tells that he used to go about the city of Paris riding sidesaddle like the ladies. Elsewhere he says that the Gascons used to have terrifying horses trained to turn about at the gallop; the French, the Picards, the Flemings and the men of Brabant, not having seen anything like it, thought this was quite miraculous.

  Those are his own words.19

  Caesar, writing of the Swedes, says that during cavalry engagements they often leap to the ground and fight on foot, having taught their horses not to budge from a spot which they quickly run back to whenever there is need. He adds that, according to their customs, nothing is so cowardly or so base as using saddles or padded cushions; since they despise those who do so, even a tiny group of them are never afraid of attacking a largish number of men so mounted.20

  [B] I used to marvel at seeing horses trained to do all sorts of manoeuvres at the touch of a wand while their reins drooped loose below their ears: that was current practice among the Massilians who rode their horses without saddle or bridle:

  Et gens quæ nudo residens Massilia dorso

  Ora levi flectit, frænorum nescia, vitga.

  [C] Et Numidæ infræni cingunt;

  [The people of Massilia, seated on their horses’ naked backs, know nothing of bridles: they guide them with a light rod. They were surrounded by Numidians who use no reins;]21

  ‘equi sine freni, deformis ipse cursus, rigida cervice et extento capite currentium’ [their horses, which are not bridled, lope along; their necks are held stiff and their heads are stretched forwards as though they were running].22

  [A] King Alfonso – the one who first founded the Chivalric Order of the Band (or Scarf) – forbade the Knights, among other rules, ever to ride he-mule or she-mule on pain of a fine of one silver mark; I have just learned that fact from Guevara’s so-called Golden Letters – those who gave them that name judged them very differently than I do. [C] And Il Corteggiano states that it was formerly a disgrace for a gentleman to ride one.23 Yet, on the contrary, the nobler the Abyssinians are and the more closely related they are to Prester John their ruler, the more they esteem it an honour to ride on a mule.

  According to Xenophon, the Assyrians always hobbled their horses in their stables, so ferocious were they and unpredictable; it took so long to unhobble and harness them that the Assyrians never stayed in an encampment unless surrounded by ditches and ramparts lest, under war conditions, the delay should act against them if they were surprised by their enemies and taken unprepared. Xenophon’s Cyrus, such a past-master in such matters, treated his horses as comrades and never ordered them to be fed before they had earned it by sweating through some exercises.24

  [B] When pressed by necessity in war, the Scythians drew blood from their horses and drank it for nourishment:

  Venit et epoto Sarmata pastus equo.

  [Then comes the Sarmatian, fed on draughts from his horses.]25

  When the men of Crete were besieged by Metellus they were so short of anything to drink that they were forced to use their horses’ urine.26

  [C] To demonstrate how much more economically the Turkish armies are managed and maintained than ours are, they say that not only do their soldiers drink nothing but water and eat nothing but rice and salt-meat ground to powder (each soldier easily carrying his ration for a month), but, like Tartars and Muscovites, they also know how to live on the blood of their horses, which they salt.

  [B] When the Spaniards made their landfall, those new people of the Indies thought that both the men and the horses were either gods or animate creatures of a nobler or higher nature than theirs. When those Indians were defeated some, coming to seek peace and pardon from the men, brought offerings of gold and food which they did not omit to offer to the horses as well, addressing speeches to them exactly as to the humans, interpreting their whinnying as the language of compromise and truce.

  In the East Indies in ancient times the first degree of honour, the King’s, was to ride an elephant; the second, to ride in a coach drawn by four horses; the third, to ride a camel, and the last and basest degree was to ride or be drawn by a single horse.

  [C] One of our contemporary writers says that he saw in that region lands where they ride on oxen equipped with small packsaddles, stirrups and bridles; he found them comfortable to sit on.27

  When Quintus Fabius Maximus Rutilianus was fighting the Samnites, he saw that his horsemen, after two or three charges, had failed to penetrate the enemy battalion; he decided that they should unbridle their horses and dig in their spurs as hard as they could; since nothing could stop them, they opened a gap for his foot-soldiers right through the scattered men and weapons, so achieving a most bloody defeat.

  Quintus Fulvius Flaccus gave similar orders when fighting against the Celtiberians: ‘Id cum majore vi equorum facietis, si effrenatos in hostes equos immittitis; quod sæpe romanos equites cum laude fecisse sua, memoriæ proditum est. Detractisque frenis, bis ultro citroque cum magna strage hostium, infractis omnibus hastis, transcurrerunt.’ [‘The shock of your horses will be greater if before throwing them against the enemy you take off their bridles. We recall that Roman horsemen have often done that with great honour.’] They removed the bridles and charged through the enemy and back again, slaughtering many and shattering all their lances.28

  [B] In former days the Duke of Muscovy owed the following mark of respect to the Tartars when they dispatched ambassadors to him: he went to meet them on foot and presented them with a bowl of mare’s milk (which is a delicacy for them); and if a drop of it fell on one of their horse’s manes as they drank it he was obliged to lick it off with his tongue.

  The army which the Emperor Bajazet sent to Russia was overwhelmed by such a dreadful snowstorm that many sought to shelter themselves from the cold and to save their lives by slaughtering their horses, slitting open their bellies and crawling quickly inside to enjoy their vital heat.29

  [C] When Bajazet was broken in battle by Tamburlane he would have saved himself as he was speeding away on his arab mare if he had not been forced to let her drink her fill when fording a stream; that made her so limp and so shivery that his pursuers easily caught up with him. It is certainly said that horses are weakened by letting them piss, but I would have thought that such drinking would have refreshed her and given her more strength.

  When Croesus was skirting the city of Sardis he found some pastures full of snakes which his pack-horses gobbled up; that, says Herodotus, was a bad omen for his enterprise.30

  [B] An ‘entire horse’ is a stallion with ears and mane; no other will pass muster. After defeating the Athenians in Sicily, the Spartans were returning in pomp from their victory to the city of Syracuse when, among other insults, they cut the manes off the defeated enemy’s horses and led them like that in their triumph.31

  Alexander fought a people called the Dahae; they went armed into battle riding two to a horse; in the melee one of them jumped down; they then took it in turns to fight mounted or on foot.32

  [C] No other nation surpasses us, I think, in skill and grace when riding. In the idiom of our language, ‘a good horseman’ seems to refer not so much to skill as to courage.

  The man known to me who was most expert, reliable and elegant at training a horse was, to my taste, the Sieur de Carnavalet, whose skills were at the service of King Henry II.

  I have seen a man ride at speed with both feet in the saddle, throw the saddle to the ground, return to pick it up, strap it on again and sit in it, with the reins hanging loose as he galloped. He rode over a hat, shot backwards at it with his bow, hitting it repeatedly; he picked up anything he liked, with one foot on the ground and the other still in the stirrup – and many other tricks by which he earned his living.

  [B] There have been seen in my own time, in Constantinople, two men on one horse, galloping at full speed and taking it in turns to jump down to the ground then up t
o the saddle; another put bridle and harness on his horse using nothing but his teeth; another, riding astride two horses, one foot on each saddle, carried a second man on his shoulders while going full tilt; that second man, standing erect, shot accurately from his bow as they raced along; several riders stood on their heads in the saddle with their feet in the air between the points of scimitars fixed to their harness.33

  When I was a boy the Prince of Sulmona in Naples, while putting an untrained horse through all sorts of manege, used to hold pieces of eight under his knees as if they had been nailed there [C] to show the firmness of his seat.

  49. On ancient customs

  [This is doubtless one of the chapters written early: its lists of ancient customs became the raw material for deeper reflections on the relativity of much that passes as natural in various societies. As it stands it has something in common with earlier works, such as the Officina (‘Workshop’) of Ravisius Textor or the Ancient Readings of Richerius Rhodiginus, which, with their successors, were appreciated especially by readers who had access to few books and enjoyed compendia.]

  [A] I am prepared to forgive our own people for having no other model or rule of perfection but their own manners and behaviour, for it is a common failing not only of the mob but of virtually all men to set their sights within the limitations of the customs into which they were born. I can accept that a man, if he met them, should find the appearance of Fabricius or [C] Laclius [A] barbaric,1 seeing that they did not wear clothing tailored to our fashion, but I do complain of his singular lack of judgement if he lets himself be so thoroughly taken in and blinded by the authority of contemporary modes that he is capable of changing his mind and his opinions every four weeks if fashion demands it, and of making mutually exclusive judgements about himself. Even if the waistband of his doublet were worn high up the chest he would heatedly maintain that that is where it ought to be; then, when it was lowered a few years later down below his thighs, he would ridicule the other fashion and find it absurd and intolerable. Today’s fashion leads him immediately to condemn the old one with so great and universal a certainty that you could say there was some species of mania making his mind do somersaults.

  Because changes of cut are so quick and sudden and the inventiveness of all the tailors in the world insufficient to provide enough novelty, it is inevitable that styles once despised should come back into fashion, only to fall out of fashion again a little while later.

  I also complain that one and the same mind should, for a period of some fifteen or twenty years, hold with such unbelievable and frivolous inconstancy two or three opinions which are not merely divergent but incompatible. [C] None of us is so clever as not to be made a mockery of by such contradictions, allowing our sight and our insight to be dazzled without realizing it.

  [A] I intend here to make a pile of a few of the customs of the Ancients which I have stored in my memory, some of them resembling ours, some of them different, so that by keeping in mind the continual changes in human affairs, our judgements on them may be more firm and more enlightened.

  Fighting with cloak and sword (as we call it) was already the custom among the Romans; Caesar says: ‘Sinistris sagos involvunt, gladiosque distringunt.’ [They wrap their garments over their left arms and draw their swords.] And he already comments on one of our national failings (which is still with us): that we stop any travellers we meet on the road, require them to tell us who they are and take it as an insult and as a pretext for a quarrel if they decline to answer.2

  The Ancients used to bath every day before dinner; it was as usual as our washing our hands; at first they only bathed their arms and legs but subsequently (by a custom which lasted several centuries among most of the peoples in the Roman world) they stripped naked and washed in a mixture of water and perfume (so that to mean that someone lived very simply they would say that he washed in water). The more elegant and refined among them perfumed their bodies three or four times a day. They removed all their hair with tweezers (just as French women, some time ago now, started to pluck out the hairs on their forehead) –

  Quod pectus, quod crura tibi, quod brachia vellis;

  [You tweeze out your hairs from chest, thighs and arms;] –

  despite having had special ointments for that purpose:

  Psilotro nitet, aut arida tatet oblita creta.

  [She glistens with a depilatory and hides behind a mask of dry plaster.]3

  They loved to lie softly and took sleeping on a palliasse as a sign of toughness. They reclined on beds for their meals, in more or less the same posture as the Turks of today:

  Inde thoro pater Æneas sic orsus ab alto.

  [Then, from his lofty bed, Father Aeneas spoke.]4

  It is said of Cato the Younger that, after the battle of Pharsalia, grieving for the lamentable state of public affairs, he adopted a more austere way of life and always took his meals sitting down. They kissed the hands of the great to honour them and to show their devotion; friends greeted each other with a kiss as as Venetians do now:

  Gratatusque darem cum dulcibus oscula verbis.

  [I would wish you well with kisses and sweet words.]5

  [C] When greeting a great man or begging his favour, they would tap him on the knee. The brother of Crates, Pasicles the philosopher, instead of placing his hand on the knee placed it on the genitals. The great man thus addressed pushed him rudely aside. ‘Come now,’ Pasicles replied, ‘are they not as much yours as your knees are?’6

  [A] Like us they ate fruit at their last course. They wiped their arses with a sponge (we can leave silly superstitions about words to the women). That is why SPONGIA is an uncouth word in Latin. The sponge was fixed to the end of a stick: that is shown by the account of the man who was being led off to be thrown to the beasts in the sight of the plebs and who asked permission to answer a call of nature; having no other means of killing himself he thrust stick and sponge down his throat and suffocated.7

  They wiped their cocks with perfumed wool after they had had a go with them:

  At tibi nil faciam, sed lota mentula lana.

  [I’ll do nothing to you till you’ve washed your tool with wool.]8

  At the street-corners in Rome they kept jars and demijohns for passers-by to piss in:

  Pusi sæpe lacum propter, se ac dolia curta

  Somno devincti credunt extollere vestem.

  [And sleepy children often dream that they are lifting their robes and pissing in the public urinals.]9

  They used to eat between meals. In summer there were men who sold snow for cooling the wine. Some even used snow in winter too, not finding their wine cool enough even then. Great men had their servers to carve and to bring them their wine, as well as fools to amuse them. In winter dishes were brought to the table on food-warmers; they also had portable kitchens – [C] I have seen some myself– [A] in which they carried about everything needed for preparing a meal:

  Has vobis epulas habete lauti;

  Nos offendimur ambulante cæna.

  [Keep your old feasts you gluttons; we dislike your portable food.]10

  They had fresh clear water flowing along small aqueducts through the basements beneath them in which they kept live fish which guests chose and caught in their hands and then had them prepared to their taste. Fish always did enjoy their present privilege of having the great take trouble to find out how to prepare them; their flesh has a more refined taste than meat, at least to my liking.

  We certainly do our utmost to equal the Ancients in every sort of ostentation, in debauchery and in the devising of gratifications, in comforts and in luxuries, for our wills are as vitiated as theirs were but our ingenuity cannot bring it off. Our powers are no more capable of competing with them in vice than in virtue, both of which derive from a vigour of mind which was incomparably greater in them than in us: the weaker the souls, the less able they are to do anything really good or really bad.

  For them the middle place at table was the most honoured. No order of prece
dence was entailed in putting names first or second, either in speech or writing; that can be seen clearly from their books: they will as readily say ‘Oppius and Caesar’ as ‘Caesar and Oppius’, or indifferently say, ‘me and you’ or ‘you and me’. That is why I was once struck by a passage of the Life of Flaminius in our French Plutarch in which, treating of the rivalry between the Aetolians and the Romans over who deserved the glory for the victory which they had jointly won, Plutarch attaches some weight to the fact that in the songs of the Greeks the Aetolians were named before the Romans – unless, that is, there is some ambiguity in the French.

  Ladies in the public baths would receive men and even got their men-servants to rub oil into them:

  Inguina succinctus nigra tibi servus aluta

  Stat, quoties calidis nuda foveris aquis.

  [Whenever you take your naked bath a slave stands by, girt with a black leathern apron above his groin.]11

  They sprinkled a kind of powder over themselves to stop the sweat.

  Sidonius Apollinaris says that the ancient Gauls wore their hair long on the front of their heads and shaved close at the neck; that is precisely the hairstyle which has been brought back into fashion by the slack and womanish mode of our own century.

  The Romans used to pay their boatmen for their ferries as soon as they came on board: we do it only when we have reached harbour:

  dum as exigitur, dum mula ligatur,

  Tola abit hora.