The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  In my own day there was a gentleman living on one of our frontiers; he was an invalid and could find no horse able to bear his weight; he was involved in a feud and campaigned in a coach such as I have described and managed very well. But let us finish with those war-coaches.

  The kings of our first Gaulish dynasty used to travel the land in a cart drawn by four oxen.10 [B] Mark Antony was the first to be drawn through Rome – with a minstrel-girl beside him – by lions harnessed to a coach. Heliogabalus did the same somewhat later, claiming to be Cybele the Mother of the gods; then, drawn by tigers, he pretended to be the god Bacchus. On other occasions he harnessed two stags to his coach; once it was four dogs; then he stripped naked and was drawn in solemn procession by four naked girls. The Emperor Firmus had his coach drawn by ostriches of such extraordinary size that he seemed to fly rather than to roll along. The oddness of such novelties leads me on to the idea that it is a sort of lack of confidence in monarchs, a sign of not being sure of their position, to strive to make themselves respected and glorious through excessive expenditure. It would be pardonable abroad but among his subjects, where he is the sovereign power, the highest degree of honour to which he can attain is derived from the position he holds. Similarly it seems to me that it is superfluous for a gentleman to take a lot of trouble over how he dresses when at home: his house, his servants, his cuisine are enough to vouch for him there.

  [C] Isocrates’ advice to his king does not seem to lack good sense: let his furniture and his tableware be magnificent, for such expenditure is of lasting value and is passed on to his successors: let him avoid all magnificence which drains away immediately from use or memory.11

  [B] When I was a young man, in default of other glories I gloried in fine clothes. In my case they were quite becoming; but there are folk on whom fine clothes sit down and cry.

  There are tales of the extraordinary meanness of some of our kings over both personal expenditure and donations – and they were kings great in reputation, wealth and fortune. Demosthenes fought unsparingly against one of his city’s laws which authorized monies to be spent on parades of athletes and festivals (he wanted his city’s greatness to be displayed in the number of its well-armed fighting-ships and in good, well-equipped forces). [C] And Theophrastus is rightly condemned for asserting the opposite doctrine in his book On Riches, in which he maintained that expenditure on festivals was the true fruit of opulence. Such pleasures, says Aristotle, have an effect only on the lowest of the low; they immediately vanish from their memory as soon as they have had enough of them; no serious man of judgement can hold them in esteem.12

  Such funds would seem to me to be more regal, useful, sensible and durable if spent on ports, harbours, fortifications and walls, on splendid buildings, on churches, hospitals and colleges, and on repairing roads and highways. In my time Pope Gregory XIII left a favourable reputation behind him by so doing; and, by so doing, our own Queen Catherine would for many a long year to come leave witnesses to her natural generosity and munificence, if only her means were sufficient for her desires.13 Fortune deeply distressed me by interrupting the construction in our capital city of the Pont neuf, a beautiful bridge, so cheating me of the hope of seeing it in regular use before I die.

  [B] Moreover to their subjects who form the spectators of these festivities, it seems that it is their own wealth that is being flaunted and that they are being feasted at their own expense. Their peoples are always ready to assume about kings what we assume about our servants: that their job is to provide abundantly for everything that we want but never to spend anything on themselves. That is why the Emperor Galba, when he was delighted by a musician during dinner, called for his chest, plunged in his hand and gave him a fistful of crowns saying, ‘This is my own money not the government’s.’14 Be that as it may, the people are usually right: money earned to feed their bellies is used instead to feed their eyes.

  Even munificence is not truly resplendent from a sovereign’s hands: it more rightly belongs to private citizens; for strictly speaking a king has nothing which is properly his own: even his person belongs to others. [C] Sentences are not passed in the interests of the judge but of the plaintiffs. We never appoint our superiors for their own advantage but for that of their inferiors; we appoint a doctor for his patients not for himself. All public offices, like all professional skills, aim at something beyond themselves: ‘nulla ars in se versatur’ [no art is concerned with itself].15

  [B] That is why those tutors of youthful princes who pride themselves on impressing upon them that there is virtue in lavishness, who exhort them not to know what it means to reject anything and to hold that money is never better spent than when given away (teaching, greatly honoured, I know, in my own lifetime), are either thinking more of their own good than that of their own master or else they do not know what they are talking about. It is all too easy to stamp ideas of generosity on a man who has the means of fulfilling them with other people’s money. [C] And since generosity is measured not against the gift but the means of the giver, in such powerful hands it always proves useless. To be generous, they discover, they have to be prodigal. [B] So it is not highly honoured compared to the other kingly virtues: it is, said Dionysius the Tyrant, the only virtue to be fully compatible with tyranny itself.16 I would rather teach a king this line from one ancient ploughman:

  that is, ‘If you want a good crop, you must broadcast your seed not pour it from your sack.’17 [C] Seed must be drilled not spilled. [B] So when a king has to make gifts or, to put it better, has to make payments to so many persons for services rendered, he should distribute royally but advisedly. If a prince’s generosity is indiscriminate and immoderate I would like him better as a miser.

  It is in justice that kingly virtue seems mainly to consist. And what most distinguishes a king is that kind of justice which is the companion of generosity; kings readily dispense all other kinds of justice through intermediaries: that one they reserve to themselves.

  Liberality without moderation is a feeble means of acquiring good-will, since it offends more people than it seduces. [C] ‘Quo in plures usus sis, minus in multos uti possis. Quid autem est stultius quant quod libenter facias, curare ut id diutius facere non possis?’ [The more people you have helped by it, the fewer you can help in the future… Is there a greater folly than doing something you like in such a way that you can do it no longer?]18 [B] And if it is exercised without due regard for merit, it embarrasses the recipient, who receives it without gratitude. There have been tyrants who have been sacrificed to the people’s hatred by the very men they have unjustly advanced, since [C] men of that sort [B] reckon that19 they can insure their possession of ill-gotten gains by showing hatred and contempt for the one they got them from; in that way they seek to placate the judgement and opinions of the people.

  The subjects of a prince who is lavish in giving become lavish in their demands. They base their assessments not on reason but example. We certainly ought often to blush at our shamelessness. We are already overpaid by just standards once the reward is equal to our services. Do we owe nothing to our princes by natural obligation? If our prince meets our expenses he has already done a great deal. Should he contribute to them, that is enough: anything above that is called a bounty: as such it cannot be demanded. (The very word liberality has the sound of liberty.) By our fashion there is no end to it: goods already received do not figure in our accounts: we only love future liberality. So the more a prince exhausts his wealth in giving, the poorer he is in friends. [C] How could he possibly slake desires which grow bigger the more he pours wealth into them? The man whose thoughts are set on getting thinks no longer of what he has got. The property of covetousness is, above all, ingratitude.20

  The example of Cyrus would not fit in badly here to serve our kings today as a touchstone for discovering whether their gifts are well or ill bestowed (and to show them that that Emperor distributed his gifts better than they do; by their extravagance they are reduced to raising
loans from subjects unknown to them or from those whom they have harmed rather than from those whom they have helped, receiving ‘gratuities’ from them which have nothing gratuitous about them but the name). Croesus reproached Cyrus for his bounty, calculating what his treasure would have amounted to if he had restrained his hands a little more. Cyrus sought to justify his liberality: so he dispatched messengers all over the place to those magnates of his empire whose interests he had individually advanced, begging each of them to help him with as much money as they could for some urgent need and to write to him disclosing the amount. When all the letters of credit were brought to him, none of his friends had reckoned that it was enough to offer merely as much as they had received from his munificence but included much of their own wealth. He found that the sum amounted to far more than Croesus’ economies. Whereupon Cyrus said to him, ‘I love riches no less than other princes do; if anything I am more sparing. You can see by what little outlay I have acquired the countless riches of so many friends, and how much better Chancellors of the Exchequer they are than hired men would be with no bonds of affection, and how my wealth is better lodged with them than in my own treasure-chests, calling down upon me the hatred, envy and contempt of other princes.’21

  [B] The Roman Emperors justified the lavishness of their public games and parades by the fact that their authority in some ways depended (in appearance at least) on the will of the people, who had ever been accustomed to be courted by such extravagant spectacles. Yet it was private citizens who had encouraged this custom of pleasing their fellow-citizens and their equals with such a profusion of magnificence drawn mainly from their own purses. It took on a quite different savour when their masters came to imitate them. [C] ‘Pecuniarum translatio a justis dominis ad alienos non debet liberalis videri.’ [Taking money from rightful owners and giving it to others ought not to be regarded as liberality.]22 When his son assayed winning the support of the Macedonians by sending them gifts, Philip reprimanded him in a letter with these words: ‘What? Do you desire that your subjects should consider you not their King but their bursar? If you want to seduce, seduce them by deeds of virtue not by deeds of your purse-strings.’

  [B] Yet there was beauty in providing a great quantity of mature trees, with thick green branches, and in planting them beautifully and symmetrically in the arena to make a great shady forest, and then, on the first day, in releasing within it a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand wild boars and a thousand deer and in handing it over to the populace to pillage; then, on the following day, in killing off before them a hundred full-grown lions, a hundred leopards and three hundred bears; then, on the third day, in having three hundred pairs of gladiators fight to the finish, as did the Emperor Probus.23 Beautiful too to see those great amphitheatres incrusted on the outside with marble and decorated with works of art and statuary, the inside gleaming with rare and precious stones –

  Baltheus en gemmis, en illita porticus auro

  [Here is the circular partition clad in gems; here, the portico, daubed with gold]

  – with all the sides surrounding that vast space completely encircled from top to bottom with sixty to eighty tiers of seats, also of marble, covered with cushions –

  exeat, inquit,

  Si pudor est, et de pulvino surgat equestri,

  Cujus res legi non sufficit;

  [‘Shame him out’, they say: ‘he has only paid for the cheapest seats, not for the cushioned ones of the knights]

  – where you could seat a hundred thousand men in comfort; beauty, too, to have the base of the arena where the games took place dug up and divided into caverns representing lairs which spewed forth the animals destined for the spectacle; subsequently to flood it with a deep sea of water, sweeping along many a sea-monster and bearing armed warships to enact a naval engagement; then, thirdly, to flatten it and drain it out afresh for the gladiatorial combats; and then, for the fourth act, to strew it, not with sand but with vermilion and aromatic resin in order to prepare upon it a formal banquet for that infinite crowd of people – the final scene on one single day!

  Quoties nos descendentis arenæ

  Vidimus in partes, ruptaque voragine terræ

  Emersisse feras, et iisdem sæpe latebris

  Aurea cum croceo creverunt arbuta libro.

  Nec solum nobis silvestria cernere monstra

  Contigit, æquoreos ego cum certantibus ursis

  Spectavi vitulos, et equorum nomine dignum,

  Sed deforme pecus.

  [How often have we beheld a section of the arena drop down, forming a gaping chasm from which emerged wild beasts and whole forests of golden trees with barks of saffron! Not only have we seen the denizens of the forests in our amphitheatres but sea-beasts set in the midst of fighting bears and those monstrous hippopotamuses honoured by the name of ‘river-horses’.]

  Sometimes they produced in the arena a great mountain covered with green trees, many bearing fruit, and a river running from its summit as from the source of a flowing stream. Sometimes they had a great ship sail into the arena; it opened up and fell apart automatically, spewed forth from its belly four or five hundred beasts of combat, reassembled itself unaided and vanished from sight. Sometimes down there in the arena they produced fountains and water-jets which spouted immensely high, sprinkling perfume over that vast multitude. To protect themselves from the hot weather they caused that immense area to be covered either with awnings of purple needlework or with variously coloured silks, which they drew or withdrew at will:

  Quamvis non modico caleant spectacula sole,

  Vela reducuntur, cum venit Hermogenes.

  [Although the fierce sun beats down on the amphitheatre they draw back the awnings whenever Hermogenes appears.]24

  Even the netting erected in front of the crowd to protect them from the ferocity of the wild beasts once they were loosed was plaited with gold:

  auro quoque torta refulgent

  Retia.

  [The very nets glisten with woven gold.]

  If anything can justify such excesses, it is the cases where the amazement was caused not by the expense but by the originality and ingenuity.

  Even in vanities such as these we can discover how those times abounded in more fertile minds than ours. The same applies to that sort of fertility as to any other which Nature produces. Which is not to say that she then employed her utmost forces.25 [C] We cannot be said to progress but rather to wander about this way and that. We follow our own footsteps. [B] I am afraid that our knowledge is in every sense weak; we cannot see very far ahead nor very far behind; it grasps little, lives little, skimped in terms of both time and matter.

  Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona

  Multi, sed omnes illachrimabiles

  Urgentur ignotique longa

  Nocte.

  [Great heroes lived before Agamemnon; many they were, yet none is lamented, being swept away unknown into the long night.]

  Et supera belium Trojanum et funera Trojœ,

  Multi alias alii quoque res cecinere poetœ.

  [Before the Trojan War and the death of Troy many other poets have sung of other wars.]26

  [C] And while on this subject I think we should not reject the testimony of Solon’s account of how he had learned from the priests of Egypt the long history of their State and their way of teaching and preserving the history of other peoples: ‘Si interminatam in omnes partes magnitudinem regionum videremus et temporum, in quam se injiciens animus et intendens ita late longeque peregrinatur, ut nullam oram ultimi videat in qua possit insistere: in hac immensitate infinita vis innumerabilium appareret fomarum.’ [If we were vouchsafed a sight of the infinite extent of time and space stretching away in every direction, and if our minds were allowed to wander over it far and wide, ranging about and hastening along without ever glimpsing a boundary where it could halt: from such an immensity we would grasp what almighty power lies behind those innumerable forms.]27

  [B] Even if everything that has come down to u
s about the past by report were true and known to someone, that would be nothing compared with what we do not know. And against the idea of a universe which flows on while we are in it, how puny and stunted is the knowledge of the most inquisitive men. A hundred times more is lost for us than what comes to our knowledge, not only of individual events (which sometimes are turned by Fortune into weighty exempla) but of the circumstances of great polities and nations. When our artillery and printing were invented we clamoured about miracles: yet at the other end of the world in China men had been enjoying them over a thousand years earlier.28 If what we saw of the world were as great as the amount we now cannot see, it is to be believed that we would perceive an endless [C] multiplication and [B] succession of forms. Where Nature is concerned, nothing is unique or rare: but where our knowledge is concerned much certainly is, which constitutes a most pitiful foundation for our scientific laws, offering us a very false idea of everything.

  Just as we vainly conclude today that the world is declining into decrepitude using arguments drawn from our own decline and decadence –

  Jamque adeo affecta est ætas, affectaque tellus

  [Our age lacks vigour now: even the soil is less abundant]29