The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [The vestal virgin jumps to her feet with each blow and every time the victor lunges his sword through his opponent’s throat she cries, ‘Oh, what fun!’ And when one of the men is struck to the ground, she twists her thumb round to have him dispatched.]4

  [A] To provide such examples the earlier Romans used criminals only; afterwards they used innocent slaves and even freemen who sold themselves for this purpose – [B] they included Senators and Roman knights; and women too.

  Nunc caput in mortem vendunt, et funus arenæ,

  Atque hostem sibi quisque parat, cum bella quiescunt.

  [Now they each sell their own persons to die in the arena: when all is at peace they find a foe to attack.]

  Hos inter fremitus novosque lusus,

  Stat sexus rudis insciusque ferri,

  Et pugnas capit improbus viriles.

  [Among these tumultuous new sports you see women, clumsy and unused to arms, fighting frenetically with the men.]5

  [A] That is something that I would have found most strange and unbelievable were it not that in our Civil Wars we have become daily accustomed to seeing thousands of foreigners pledging for money their very life-blood in quarrels which are no concern of theirs at all.

  24. On the greatness of Rome

  [A series of exempla partly arising from reading an edition of Julius Caesar, and starting with a major borrowing from Cicero’s Epistulae familiares, ‘Familiar letters’, which many, including Montaigne, thought to be better called Epistulae ad familiares, ‘Letters to his friends’.]

  [A] I only want to say one word on this inexhaustible subject in order to show the silliness of those who compare the wretched greatness of our times to that of Rome. In the seventh book of Cicero’s Epistulae familiares (and our grammarians if they wish can indeed remove the epithet familiar, which is not really appropriate, while those who wish to replace familiares by ad familiares [to his friends] can find some support from Suetonius, who in his Life of Caesar says that he had a volume of his Epistulae ad familiares),1 there is a letter from Cicero to Caesar, then in Gaul, in which he repeats words from another letter which Caesar had written to him: ‘As for Marcus Furius whom you have recommended to me, I will make him King of Gaul; and if you want me to advance some other friend of yours, send him to me.’2 It was no new thing for a simple Roman citizen, as Caesar then was, to dispose of kingdoms, since he relieved King Dejotarus of his to bestow it on a nobleman of the town of Pergamo who was called Mithridates. And his biographers mention several other kingdoms which he sold; Suetonius says that he extorted from King Ptolemy three million six hundred thousand crowns at one go – which was tantamount to selling it to him!

  [B] Tot Galatæ, tot Pontus eat, tot Lydia nummis.

  [For Galatia, so much, Pontus, so much, Lydia, so much.]

  Mark Antony said that the greatness of the Roman people was not so much revealed by what they took away as by what they gave away.3 [C] Yet among other things, a good century before Antony they took away something with such a wonderful show of authority that I do not know any single event in all of their history which raises higher the credit of the name of Rome: Antiochus had subdued the whole of Egypt and was preparing to conquer Cyprus and other outposts of its Empire; in the flood of his victories Gaius Popilius journeyed to him on behalf of the Senate and, from the outset, refused to clasp his hand until he had read the letter he had brought. King Antiochus read it and said he would think about it; whereupon Popilius drew a circle round him with his baton and said: ‘Before you step out of that circle give me an answer to take back to the Senate.’ Antiochus was thunderstruck by the roughness of so pressing an order; he reflected for a while and then said: ‘I shall do whatever the Senate commands me.’ Thereupon Popilius greeted him as a friend of the Roman People.4 When his fortunes were prospering thus he gave up so great a monarchy under the impact of three lines of writing! He was indeed right, as he later did, to inform the Senate by his ambassadors that he had received their command with the same respect as if it had come from the immortal gods.

  [B] All the kingdoms which Augustus conquered by right of war he either restored to those who had lost them or bestowed on foreigners.

  [A] In this connection Tacitus, talking of the English King Cogidunus, has a marvellous remark which makes us feel Rome’s infinite power. ‘The Romans,’ he says, ‘from the earliest times have been accustomed to leave kings whom they have vanquished in the possession of their kingdoms but under their authority, so that they might have even kings as tools of servitude – ‘ut haberet instrumenta servitutis et reges’.5

  [C] It is likely that Solyman, whom we have seen generously giving away the Kingdom of Hungary and other states,6 was moved more by that consideration than by the one he usually cited: namely that he was sated by so many monarchies [’95] and overburdened by such dominion acquired by his own virtue or that of his forebears.

  25. On not pretending to be ill

  [Molière may have been thinking of this chapter when his Imaginary Invalid wondered: ‘Is there not some danger in pretending to be ill?’]

  [A] There is an epigram of Martial’s – a good one, for there are all kinds in his book – in which he amusingly tells of Coelius who pretended to suffer from gout in order to avoid having to pay court to some of the Roman grandees, be present at their levees, wait upon them and join their followers. To make his excuse more plausible he would cover his legs with ointment, wrap them in bandages and in every way counterfeit the gait and appearance of sufferers from the gout. In the end Fortune favoured him by giving it to him:

  Tantum cura potest et ars doloris,

  Desiit fingere Cælius podagram.

  [So much can care and the art of pain! Coelius has no longer to feign to be gouty.]1

  I have read somewhere in Appian [C] I think [A] a similar tale of a man who sought to escape from a declaration of outlawry by the Roman Triumvirate and to hide from his pursuers; he remained in hiding, took on a disguise, deciding in addition to pretend to be blind in one eye. When he was able to recover a little liberty and wanted to rid himself of the plaster which he had worn so long over his eye, he found that he had actually lost the sight of that eye while under the mask. It is possible that his power of sight had been weakened by not having being exercised for such a long time and that his visual powers had all transferred to the other eye: for we can plainly feel that when we cover one eye it transfers to its fellow some part of its activity so that the remaining eye grows and becomes swollen; similarly for that gouty man in Martial: lack of use, together with the heat of his ointments and bandages, may well have concentrated upon his leg some gouty humour.

  Since I read in Froissart2 of the vow taken by a troop of some young English noblemen to keep their left eyes covered until they had crossed into France and achieved some great deed of arms against us, I have often been obsessed by the thought that it may have befallen them as it did to those others and that when they came back to greet the ladies for whose sake they had done such deeds they would all have become blind in one eye.

  Mothers are right to scold their children when they play at being one-eyed, limping or squinting or having other such deformities; for, leaving aside the fact that their tender bodies may indeed acquire some bad habit from this, it seems to me that Fortune (though I do not know how) delights in taking us at our word: I have heard of many examples of people falling ill after pretending to be so.

  [C] Whether riding or walking I have always been used to burdening my hand with a cane or stick, even affecting an air of elegance by leaning on it with a distinguished look on my face. Several people have warned me that one day Fortune may change this affectation into a necessity. I comfort myself with the thought that, if so, I would be the first of my tribe to get the gout!

  [A] But let us stretch out this chapter and stick on to it a different coloured patch concerned with blindness. Pliny tells of a man who, never having been ill before, dreamt he was blind and woke up next morning to find that he
was.3 The force of imagination could well have contributed to that, as I have said elsewhere, and Pliny seems to share that opinion: but it is more likely that the dream was produced by the same internal disturbances as his body experienced and which deprived him of his sight; if they want to, the doctors will find their cause…

  Now let us add another closely similar account which Seneca gives in one of his letters.4 ‘You know Harpasté, my wife’s female idiot,’ he wrote to Lucilius. ‘She is staying in my house as I have inherited the burden of looking after her. I loathe such freaks; if I ever want to laugh at a fool I do not have to look far: I can laugh at myself. She has suddenly become blind. It may seem incredible but it is true that she does not realize she is blind: she keeps begging her keeper to take her away; she thinks that my house is too dark. What in her we laugh at I urge you to believe to apply to each one of us. No one realizes he is miserly; no one realizes he is covetous. At least the blind do ask for a guide: we wander off alone. “I am not an ambitious man,” we say, “but you can live in Rome no other way. I am no spendthrift, but it costs a lot merely to live in Rome.” “It is not my fault if I get angry or if I have had not yet definitely settled down: it is the fault of my youth.” Let us not go looking elsewhere for our evils: they are at home in us, rooted in our inward parts. We make the cure harder precisely because we do not realize we are ill. If we do not soon start to dress our wounds, when shall we ever cure them and their evils? Yet Philosophy provides the sweetest of cures: other cures are enjoyed only after they have worked: this one cures and gives joy all at once.’

  That is what Seneca says; he carried me off my subject, but there is profit in the change.

  26. On thumbs

  [Renaissance etymologies are often very fanciful, but in the case of the French and Latin words for thumb (pouce, pollex) philologists today continue to accept the derivations advanced by Montaigne and his contemporaries. Our own word ‘thumb’ derives also, it seems, from. Sanskrit word meaning ‘the strong one’.]

  [A] Tacitus relates that it was the custom among certain Barbarian kings to make a treaty binding by pressing their right hands together and interlocking their thumbs until they had squeezed the blood to their tips, whereupon they lightly pricked them with a needle and sucked each other’s blood.1

  Doctors say that our thumb is our master-finger and that our French word for it, pouce, derives from the Latin verb pollere [to excel in strength].2 The Greeks called it anticheir, ‘another hand’, so to speak. And the Latins seem occasionally to use it to mean the whole of the hand:

  Sed nec vocibus excitata blandis,

  Molli pollice nec rogata, surgit.

  [Neither sweet words of persuasion nor the help of her thumb can get it erect.]

  In Rome it was a sign of approval to turn your thumbs and twist them downwards –

  Fautor utroque tuum laudabit pollice ludum

  [Your fans admire your play by turning down both their thumbs]

  –and of disapproval to raise them and extend them outwards:

  converso pollice vulgi

  Quemlibet occidunt populariter.

  [when the mob twist their thumbs round, anyone at all is slaughtered to their acclaim.]3

  The Romans exempted from war-service those who had injured thumbs since they could no longer firmly grasp their weapons. Augustus confiscated the estates of a Roman knight who had craftily cut off the thumb of two of his sons to stop them being mobilized into the army. Before that, during the Italian Wars, the Senate had sentenced Caius Vatienus to life imprisonment and confiscated all his estates for having deliberately cut off his left thumb to get out of an expedition. Some general or other (I cannot remember his name) cut off the thumb of his defeated enemies after winning a naval engagement so as to deprive them of the means of fighting and of pulling on the oar.4 [C] The Athenians did the same to the men of Aegina to deprive them of their naval superiority.5 [B] In Sparta the schoolmaster punished his pupils by biting their thumbs.

  27. On cowardice, the mother of cruelty

  [Montaigne returns to the theme of cruelty (of. ‘On conscience’, II, 5; ‘On cruelty’, II, 11; and ‘On coaches’, III, 6.) He loathed torture, then widely practised as a justifiable means of interrogation, being accepted as such by Roman Law, and like many, including Michel de l’Hôpital and French kings at least from Charles IX, disliked duelling. Montaigne’s opinion that torture, or indeed anything beyond straightforward execution, amounted to cruelty caused some disquiet in the Vatican, but Montaigne held his ground.]

  [A] I have often heard it said that cowardice is the mother of cruelty. [B] And I have learned from experience that that harsh rage of wicked inhuman minds is usually accompanied by womanish weakness. I have known the cruellest of men to cry easily for the most frivolous of causes. The Tyrant Alexander of Pheres could not bear to hear tragedies performed in the amphitheatre for fear that the citizens might see him, who had without pity put many to death every day, blubbering over the misfortunes of Hecuba and Andromache.1 Can it be a weakness in their soul which makes such men susceptible to every extreme? [A] Valour (which acts only to overcome resistance) –

  Nec nisi bellantis gaudet cervice juvenci

  [And which takes no delight in killing even a bull unless unless it resists]2 –

  stops short when it sees the enemy at its mercy. But pusillanimity, so as to join in the festivities even though it could not have any role in the first act, chooses its role in the second: that of blood and slaughter. Murders after victory are normally done by the common people and the men in charge of the baggage-train; and what makes us, witness so many unheard of cruelties in these people’s wars of ours is that the common riff-raff become used to war and swagger about, up to their arms in blood, hacking at a body lying at their feet since they can conceive of no other valour:

  [B] Et lupus et turpes instant morientibus ursi,

  Et quæcunque minor nobilitate fera est,

  [The wolves and base bears fall on the dying, and so do all the more ignoble beasts,]3

  [A] like the cowardly curs which, in our homes, snap and tear at the skins of wild beasts which they would not dare to attack in the field.

  What is it that makes all our quarrels end in death nowadays? Whereas our fathers knew degrees of vengeance we now begin at the end and straightway talk of nothing but killing. What causes that, if not cowardice? Everyone knows that there is more bravery in beating an enemy than in finishing him off; more contempt in making him bow his head than in making him die; that, moreover, the thirst for vengeance is better slaked and satisfied by doing so, since the only intention is to make it felt. That is why we do not attack a stone or an animal if it hurts us, since they are incapable of feeling our revenge. To kill a man is to shield him from our attack.

  [B] And just as Bias cried out to a wicked man, ‘I know you will be punished sooner or later, but I am afraid afraid I shall never live to see it’; and just as he sympathized with the Orchomenians because the chastisement of Lyciscus’ treachery against them came at a time when there was nobody left who had suffered by it whom such chastisement would have gratified the most: vengeance is at its most wretched when it is wreaked upon someone who has lost the means of feeling it; for, as the one who seeks revenge wishes to see it if he is to enjoy it, the one who receives it must see it too if he is to suffer the pain and be taught a lesson.4

  [A] ‘He’ll be sorry for it,’ we say. Do we really think he is sorry for it once we have shot him through the head? Quite the contrary: if we look closely we will find him cocking a snook as he falls: he does not even hold it against us. That is a long way from feeling sorry! [C] And we do him one of the kindest offices of this life, which is to let him die quickly and painlessly. [A] He is at rest while we have to scuttle off like rabbits, running away from the officers of the watch who are on our trail. Killing is all right for preventing some future offence but not for avenging one already done. [C] It is a deed more of fear than of bravery; it is an act of ca
ution rather than of courage; of defence rather than of attack. [A] It is clear that by acting thus we give up both the true end of vengeance and all care for our reputation: we show we are afraid that if we let the man live he will do it again. [C] By getting rid of him you act not against him but against yourself.

  In the Kingdom of Narsinga their way of doing things would be no use to us. There, not only soldiers but even artisans settle their quarrels with their swords; their king never denies the field to any who would fight a duel, and, and in the case of men of quality he honours it with his presence and bestows a golden chain on the victor. But the very first man who wants that chain can dispute it with the wearer who, by having rid himself of one duel, finds himself with several more on his hands.5

  [A] If we had thought that we had for ever overcome our enemy by valour and could dominate him as we pleased, we would be sorry indeed if he were to escape: he does that when he dies. We do want to beat him, but with more security than honour, [C] and we seek not so much glory through our quarrel but the end of that quarrel.

  For a man of honour Asinius Pollio also made a similar mistake: he wrote invectives against Plancus but waited until he died before he published them. That was like poking out your tongue to a blind man, shouting insults at a deaf one or hitting a man who cannot feel it, rather than risking his resentment. And they said of him that only the shades should shadow-box with the dead. Anyone who waits to see an author dead before attacking his writings, what does he reveal except that he is both weak and quarrelsome?6 Aristotle was told that someone had spoken ill of him: ‘Let him do worse,’ he replied, ‘let him scourge me – as long as I am not there!’