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1. Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus and Life of Flaminius.

2. Durand de Villegagnon struck land, in Brazil, in 1557. Cf. Lettres sur la navigation du chevalier de Villegaignon es terres de l’Amérique, Paris, 1557, by an author who calls himself simply N.B.

3. ’80: our bellies, as they say, applying it to those whose appetite and hunger make them desire more meat than they can manage: I fear that we too have curiosity far more…

4. Plato, Timaeus, 24E etc., and Girolamo Benzoni, Historia del mondo novo, Venice 1565. Cf. also Plato, Critias, 113 A ff.

5. Virgil, Aeneid, III, 414–17.

6. Horace, Ars poetica, 65–6.

7. ’88: changes sickly and feverish. When…

8. The Secreta secretorum is supposititious. Montaigne is following Girolamo Benzoni.

9. Propertius, I, ii, 10–12.

10. Plato, Laws, X, 889 A-C.

11. Cf. Elizabeth Armstrong, Ronsard and the Age of Gold, Cambridge, 1968.

12. Seneca, Epist. moral., XC, 44. (This epistle is a major defence of the innocence of natural man before he was corrupted by philosophy and progress.)

13. Virgil, Georgics, II, 208.

14. One of Montaigne’s sources was Simon Goulart’s Histoire du Portugal, Paris, 1587, based on a work by Bishop Jeronimo Osorio (da Fonseca) and others.

15. Suidas, Historica, caeteraque omnia quae ad cognitionem rerum spectant, Basle, 1564.

16. Cf. Cicero, De divinatione, I, i. 1; I Peter 1:2; I Corinthians 12:20; 13:2.

17. Herodotus, History, IV, Ixix.

18. Sextus Empiricus, Hypotyposes, III, xxiv; Caesar, Gallic Wars, VII, lvii-lviii; Juvenal, Satires, XV, 93–4.

19. Mummies were imported for use in medicines. (Othello’s handkerchief was steeped in ‘juice of mummy’.)

20. ’80: generously in every way, and furnish them with all the comforts they can devise but…

21. ’80: their virtue and their constancy…

22. ’80: true and solid victory…

23. Claudian, De sexto consulatu Honorii, 248–9.

24. Nicolas Chalcocondylas (tr. Blaise de Vigenère), De la décadence de l’empire grec, V, ix.

25. Seneca, De constantia, II.

26. ’80: by us: he is vanquished in practice but not by reason; it is his bad luck which we may indict not his cowardice. Sometimes…

27. Cf. Cicero, Tusc. disput., I, xli, 100 for the glory of Leonidas’ death in the defile of Thermopylae.

28. Diodorus Siculus, XV, xii.

29. ’80: their constancy and ours…

30. Standard examples: cf. Tiraquellus, De legibus connubialibus, XIII, 35, for all these un-jealous wives. (But Leah and Sarah were in fact Jacob’s wives.)

31. Anacreon was the great love-poet of Teos (fl. 540 BC).

32. ’80: their language is the pleasantest language in the world; its sound is agreeable to the ear and has terminations…

33. In 1562, when Rouen was retaken by Royalist forces.