The Complete Essays
Page 167
31. Montaigne has Machiavelli’s Prince in mind throughout this chapter. This anecdote is from the anonymous Thesoro Politico cioè relationi, instruttioni… di multo importanza per li disegni di principe (II, v), a major source in several chapters.
32. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, III, Aristippus, VI.
33. Same examples in Ravisius Textor, Officina, s.v. Obliviosi.
34. Cicero, Academica, II (Lucullus), vii, 22; then, Terence, Eunuch, I, ii, 25.
35. Cicero (De senectute, vii, 22), ‘had never known an old man forget where he had hidden his treasure!’
36. From the Letters of Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, the adopted son of Pliny the Elder.
37. Aulus Gellius, V, iii (Democritus judging Protagoras’ ability).
[A] until [C]: famished! And, were I to be given a horse with its gear, I very much doubt whether I would know how to harness it for my service. From these…
38. ’80: ignobility of my subject, which is myself, cannot tolerate any fuller or more solid ones: and in addition it is a new and fantastical humour which impels me and we must let it run. […] worth and the boldness and rashness of my design…
Following lines from Martial, Epigrams, XIII, 2, attacking censorious critics and know-alls.
39. ’80: brush? And may I not portray what I find out about myself, whatever it may be?…
Following line from Petrarch, Sonnet 135.
40. Diogenes Laertius, Life of Chrysippus.
41. Terence, Andrea, I, vi, 32.
42. Acts 1:26. To choose between Joseph Barsabbas and Matthias as a successor to the apostolate of Judas Iscariot, the Church drew lots.
43. Cicero, Academica, II (Lucullus), xxi, 68; then Tibullus, IV, i, 40–1.
44. The leader of the opposition to the ruthless raisons d’état of Il Principe was Innocent Gentillet, whose treatise on government (Geneva?, 1576) was often called l’Anti-Machiavel.
45. Horace, Epistles, II, ii, 97. For the argument cf. III, 13, ‘On experience’.
46. Juvenal, Satires, VIV, 183–4.
47. Many changes from [A]: thought he lacked judgement? […] agility and beauty and nobility: but superior judgement […] we think that they are ours. The erudition […] it is a nature of writing of little credit. The stupidest man in the world thinks he has as much understanding as the cleverest. That is why [A] It is commonly held…
48. Lucretius, V, 959; Montaigne is about to follow the proverbial wisdom of Socrates; cf. Erasmus, Adages, I, VII, LXXVI, In se descendere, which contains Montaigne’s quotation from Persius, Satires, IV, 23 – a major moral commonplace; also Nosce teipsum (I, VII, XCV) and In tuum ipsius sinum inspue (I, VII, XCIV). These adages form the cream of Socratic wisdom for many Renaissance moralists.
49. Cicero, De officiis, I, xxxi, III.
50. That is, blind self-love, philautia, which leads a man to flatter himself and to condemn others. Erasmus’ adages cited in note 48 support Montaigne’s contention that the wise man, by ‘descending into himself’, far from being selfish can avoid the vices of self-love.
51. According to Plutarch, the Persians held the two greatest vices to be borrowing and lying (Qu’il ne faut point emprunter à usure, 131C). Perhaps the origin of this assertion.
52. Philosophers study Cicero; doctors, Galen; lawyers, Ulpian; theologians, Jerome. Montaigne is criticizing all the university disciplines.
53. Horace, Satires, II, ii, 254–8.
54. Lactantius, Divinarum Institutiones, III, v. Also cited by Justus Lipsius, Politici, V, x.
55. In his list Montaigne includes men opposed to him in war or doctrine, e.g. the Spanish Duke of Alba who fought against France, and Theodore Beza, the erotic poet who became Calvin’s great successor as leader of the Reformed Church. General Anne de Montmorency died, aged seventy-four, at the Battle of St-Denis, 1567. The following passage between asterisks is suspect and may have been added to the posthumous printed editions by Marie de Gournay, the subject of its praise, who edited the Essais.
1. Horace, Satires, I, iv, 73–5; then Persius, Satires, V, 19–21.
2. Until [C]: It is to be hidden in some corner of a library and as a pastime for anyone who has a private interest in knowing me; for a neighbour…
3. [A] until [C]: beloved ancestors and to disdain them. A dagger, a suit of armour, a sword which served them, I preserve, out of love for them, as well as I can, from the injuries of time. However…
Quotation from St Augustine, City of God, I, xiii.
4. [A] until [C]: convenient. I had to cast this portrait in print to free myself from the bother of making several manuscript copies. In return for this convenience which I have borrowed from the public I hope to do it the service of providing wrapping-paper…
Then, Martial, Epigrams, XIII, i; Catullus, XCIV, 8.
5. Cf. Joachim Du Bellay’s reasons for writing personal poetry (Regrets, 4, 14, etc.). Then, Clément Marot, Epistre de Fripelipes against Sagon, punning on his name Sagon (sagouin, lout).
6. Pindar, in Plutarch, Life of Marius; Plato, Republic, VI, 489e ff.
7. Presbyter Salvianus of Massilia, De gubernatione Dei, I, i, xiv (a work printed in Paris in 1580).
8. Plutarch, Life of Lysander.
9. Lopez de Gomara (tr. Fumée), Histoire generale des Indes, II, xxviii. (These new-found ‘Indies’ are the Americas.)
10. Androclidas criticizing Lysander, in Plutarch’s Life of Lysander.
11. Cf. II, 33, ‘The tale of Spurina’, and also the insulting by Christians of the Emperor Julian in II, 19, ‘On freedom of conscience’.
1. Only two manuscripts of part of Tacitus’ Annals survived. Montaigne read Tacitus through at one go (III, 8, ‘On the art of conversation’) and had studied the Commentaria on Tacitus of Justus Lipsius. For some, Tacitus was very much to be condemned since in his account of Nero’s persecution (Annals, XV, 44) he refers to Christianity as ‘a pernicious superstition’.
2. Ammianus Marcellinus, XXXV, iv.
3. Ibid., XVI, v.
4. Ibid., XXV, iii. (Epaminondas was a model hero for Montaigne.)
5. Cf. Prudentius, Apotheosis, 448–53.
6. Theodoret, Bishop of Cyprus, for the first version, Zonaras for the second. Montaigne’s authorities who witnessed Julian’s death are Ammianus Marcellinus and Eutropius.
7. Ammianus Marcellinus, XXI, v.
8. Cf. Erasmus, Adages, I, I, LXX, Homo homini lupus.
9. A line from Terence (Andria, II.i.6–7), satirically applied long before Montaigne to the King of France acting under compulsion, e.g. ‘Pasquillus on the King of France compelled to make peace: Quoniam id fieri quod vis non potest, velis id quod possis’ [‘Since you cannot do what you wish, Wish what you can’], in Pasquillus novus Terentianus, 1546 (no place of printing).
1. Lucretius, IV, 1130–1. (The ensuing ‘greatest of our pleasures’ is sexual intercourse.)
2. Italian word meaning delicate flesh-tints. Montaigne sees in it the Latin word morbidus (disease, unwholesome).
3. Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXIV, 18. (The following translated Greek verse appears in John Stobaeus’ Sententiae.)
4. Plato, Phaedo, 60B; then Seneca, Epist. moral., XCIX, 25 (Metrodorus, cited with disapproval by Seneca.)
5. Ovid, Tristia, IV, iii, 27; Catullus, XXVII, 1–2; Seneca, Epist. moral., LXIII, 5, citing his Stoic teacher Attalus.
6. Seneca, Epist. moral., LXIX, 4.
7. Erasmus, Adages, I, X, IX, Hydram secus (citing Plato, Republic, IV, 426E–427A); then Tacitus, Annals, XIV, xliv.
8. Livy, XXXII, xx.
9. Condensed from Cicero, De nat. deorum, I, xxii, 60, on ‘What is the Being and Nature of God?’
1. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VI, Vespasianus Pater, XVII.
2. Doubtless Henry IV.
3. Details from the anonymous Tesoro politico per li disegni de Principe and from Froissart.
4. Johannes Zonaras; Xenophon, Cyropaedia, I, ii; Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXXVIII, 19.
5
. Livy, II, xlv; Simon Goulart, Histoire du Portugal, V, vii.
6. Diodorus Siculus, Philistus; the historian–admiral killed himself after being defeated by Dion (356 BC).
7. Jeronimo Conestaggio, Dell’unione del regno di Portogallo alla… Castiglia (Genoa, 1585); interpolated quotation from Livy, II, iv.
8. Cf. I, 37, ‘On Cato the Younger’ (of Utica). Plutarch’s Life is the main source.
1. Xenophon, Cyropaedia, VIII, vi, 17–18.
2. Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico, III, iii; Suetonius, Caesar, LVII; Pliny, Hist. nat., VII, xx; Livy, XXXVII, vii.
3. Pliny, Hist. nat., X, XIV, xxxviii.
4. Lopes de Gomara, Hist. des Indes, V, vii.
5. Nicolas Chalcocondylas (tr. Vigenère), Histoire de la décadence de l’Empire Grec et établissement de celuy des Turcs, Paris, 1585.
1. Juvenal, Satires, VI, 291–2.
2. Catullus, LXVIII, 77–8.
3. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, II, Prisca Lacedaemorum instituta, XXV.
4. Prudentius, Contra Orationem Symmachi, I, 382–3; II, 1122–6; II, 1096–9.
5. Manlius, Astronomica, IV, 225–6; Statius, Sylvae, I, vi, 51–3.
1. Suetonius, Caesar, XVI.
2. Cicero, Epist. fam., VII, v.
3. Cicero, De divinatione, I, xv, 26–7; for Mithridates, the anonymous De Bello Alexandrino, XXVI; Suetonius, Caesar, LIV; Claudianus, In Eutropium, I, 203; Plutarch, Mark Antony, VIII.
4. Livy, LXV, xii ff.
5. Tacitus, Agricola, XIV.
6. Solyman entrusted the Kingdom to Elizabeth of Hungary as Regent.
1. Martial, Epigrams, VII, xxxix; then Appianus, IV, vi.
2. Froissart. I, xxix.
3. Pliny, His., nat., VII, i; cf. I, 21, ‘On the power of the imagination’.
4. Seneca, Epist. moral., L, 2 ff., 9.
1. Tacitus, Annals, XII, xlvii.
2. Pollex, the Latin for thumb, ‘the strong one’, was indeed derived from the verb ‘to be strong’. Cf. Macrobius, Saturnalia, VII, xiii. The Greek etymology is fanciful.
3. Martial, Epigrams, XII, xcviii, 8; Horace, Epist., I, xviii, 66; Juvenal, III, 36. (Our ‘thumbs up’ was ‘thumbs down’ for the Romans.)
4. Suetonius, Augustus, XXIV; Valerius Maximus, V; Plutarch, Life of Lysander. Philoctetes left them able to row (in the galleys).
5. Cicero, De officiis. III, xi, 46; then, Plutarch, Life of Lysander.
1. Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas.
2. Claudianus, Ad Hadriam, 30.
3. Ovid, Tristia, III, v, 35–6.
4. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Comment il faut uoir (30 G) and Pour quoy la justice divine differe… la punition (258 E-G).
5. S. Goulart, Histoire du Portugal, IV, xii.
6. From a note of Vives on Augustine, City of God, V, xxvii; then, Diogenes Laertius, Aristotle, V, xviii.
7. Livy, xxxiv, 28.
8. Enguerrand de Monstrelet, Chroniques, I, ix; Herodotus, I, lxxxii; Livy, I, xxiv.
9. Virgil, Aeneid, XI, 156–7.
10. Livy, Annals, XXVIII.
11. Tasso, Gierusalemme liberata, XII, 55–62.
12. Valerius Maximus, II, iii.
13. Plutarch, Life of Caesar, then, Life of Philopoemen.
14. Plato, Laches, 183 B–C; then Laws, 796.
15. Of the Eastern Empire. Zonaras, III.
16. Claudianus, In Eutropium, I, 182.
17. ’95: beauty. When such accounts are richly beautiful in themselves and can sustain themselves in isolation, I am content to link them to my argument with a scrap of hair. Among…
Then Livy, XL, iii.
18. Josephus, De vita sua. (Torture was a legacy of Roman Law.)
19. Nicolas Chalcocondylas, Hist. de la decadence de l’Empire grec et l’etablissement de celui des Turcs, X, ii; Jacques Lavardin, Scanderbeg, Roi d’Albanie (1576), 446.
20. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Malignité de Herodote, 651 C; then Bishop Paolo Giovio, Historia sui temporis, XIII.
1. Livy, XXXVIII.
[A]: self-murderer, do great honour to the former, in my opinion, for a find them very wide apart. What they tell…
2. Plutarch: Parallel lives of Flaminius and Philopoemen; then, Juvenal, VI, 444; Plutarch (tr. Amyot) Diets notables des Lacedaemoniens, 216 F; Life of Philopoemen, VIII.
3. Seneca, Epist. moral., XXXVI, 4.
4. Horace, Odes, II, xviii, 17–19; then, Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXVII, 3; Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 653.
5. Pseudo-Gallus, I, 104–5.
6. Seneca, Epist. moral., LXVIII, 14.
1. Seneca, Epist. moral., LIII, 11–12 (mocked in II, 12, ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’, as are the following anecdotes about Pyrrho).
2. Diogenes Laertius, Pyrrho, IX.
3. Tibullus, De inertia inguinis. (Story from H. Estienne, Apologie pour Hérodote, XV, xxix.)
4. Propertius, II, xiii, 17–22.
5. From Classical times suttee was known from Cicero, Tusc. disput., V, xxvii, 77 and its commentators; Montaigne clearly used another source as well.
6. Plutarch, Life of Alexander.
7. ‘Our Masters’: the title of Professors of Theology in the Sorbonne. Their explanation of God’s foreknowledge is the standard Platonico-Christian one: God, the Creator of time, alone has an absolute existence outside time. For God, all things past, present and future are seen in an eternal present. But to see an event is not to cause it; neither, for God therefore, is ‘foreseeing’ necessarily causative. (Cf. the end of II, 12, ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’.)
8. A theological quip. A ‘lively’ faith, a faith informed with charity, manifests itself through the works of charity. Otherwise it is dead. Theological controversy led Reformers and Evangelicals to segregate faith and works into discrete compartments: a man may have the ‘true’ faith yet do no corresponding good works which prove it to be a true and lively one. Both sides in the Civil Wars could be misled into contempt for good works, prizing orthodoxy above all else. Hence (for Montaigne) the decadence and the atrocities of his age in which rival credal orthodoxies took precedence over works of charity.
9. Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, XXX. (Guillaume Postel, the Renaissance expert on Turkish affairs, was struck by the religion and piety of the Turks and by their valour.)
10. Cf. Innocent Gentillet, Discours… de bien gouverner, II, xii. Then, Nicolas Chalcocondylas, De la décadence…, VII, viii.
11. Doubtless Henry of Navarre (Henry IV).
’95: profit from it, should he either believe it or else use it as justification to take extraordinary risks, provided that Fortune does not tire too soon of giving him a leg up. [B] In living…
12. The would-be assassins were Jeaureguy (1582) and Balthasar Gérard (1584).
13. The murder of the Duc de Guise (1563) by Poltrot de Méré.
14. Balthasar Gérard.
15. ’95: city, during our expeditions in the Crusades. So too Conrad, Marquess of Montfarat, whose murderers were all brought to the scaffold full of elation and proud of so beautiful a masterpiece… Cf. Bernard de Girard, Hist. des Roys de France.
1. Cicero, De divinatione, II, xxxi, 56; Aristotle, Rhetorica, III, viii. On Epimenides the Greek philosopher and thaumaturge, cf. Cicero, De legibus, II, 11, 28; De divinatione, I, xviii; Pliny, VII, 48–53.
2. Cicero, De divinatione, II, xxii, 49. (The Platonic notion of the ‘great chain of being’ held that God in his infinite power created all possible forms. Man, being finite, can know only a few of them.)
1. Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, X, ix, 1180a (with, for Crete, I, xiii, 1102a). The educational ideas of Sparta so impressed Erasmus that he devoted a whole section of the Apophthegmata to them, remarking as how Christians can learn from them.
2. Juvenal, VI, 647–9; Hippocrates, in Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Comment il fault refrener la colere 579–H and, later, 60 E.
3. Juvenal, XIV, 70–3.
4. Ovid, De arte amandi, III, 503–4. (Echoes of Seneca’s De ira, III, xxxii, and of Plutarch’
s (tr. Amyot) Comment il fault refrener la colere, and of Suetonius’ Caesar.)
5. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Dicts notables des Lacedaemoniens, 216–18.
6. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Comment il fault ouir, 26G. Then, Aulus Gellius, I, xxvi.
7. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Comment il fault nourrir les enfans, 6D–E; Dicts notables des anciens Roys, 198 F–G. Both anecdotes are well-known from Erasmus’ Apophthegmata, VII, Plato, VII; I, Charillus seu Charilaus, XLV; cf. also VIII, Architas, XXXII.