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1. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Que les bestes usent de la Raison, 274AB. ’80: qualities. For as concerns bodily shape it is evident that the species of beasts are distinguished by a mote evident difference than we are from each other. Truly…
2. ’80: mind – for fools and those made witless by accident are not complete men, that I would go…
3. Terence, Eunuch, II, iii, 1, adapted. and that beast, meaning that the most excellent of the animals is nearer to a man of lowest degree than that man is to another man, great and excellent. He…
4. Juvenal, Satires, VIII, lvii.
5. Horace, Satires, I, ii, 86.
6. Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXVI, 31. (There are a great many echoes of this and other Epistles of Seneca in this section.)
7. Horace, Satires, II, vii, 83–8. ’80: an empire and riches unto himself; he lives satisfied, content and happy. And whoever has that, what more is there? ‘non ne videmus…
8. Plautus, Trinummus, II, ii, 84; Lucretius, II, 16.
9. Herodotus says the same, without the irony (V, vii).
10. Lucretius, IV, 1123–5.
11. A combination of two phrases in Seneca: Epist. moral., CXIX, 12 and CXV, 9.
12. Horace, Odes, II, xvi, 9–12; Lucretius, II, 47–50.
13. Lucretius, II, 34–6; Erasmus, Apophthegmata, IV, Alexander Macedo, XVI. (Alexander was echoing Homer’s account of Venus wounded by Diomedes.)
14. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), De Isis et Osiris, 323F; Erasmus, Apophthegmata, IV, Antigonus Rex Macedonum, VII. (The poet’s name was Hermodotus not Hermodorus. The error is Montaigne’s. In the Quart Livre of Rabelais, as in Erasmus, he is correctly named.)
15. Persius, Satires, II, 38–9; Terence, Heautontimorumenos, I, iii, 21–6; Horace, Epistles, I, ii, 47–52.
16. Plato, Laws, II, 661C–D.
17. Tibullus, I, i, 71; Horace, Epistles, I, xii, 5. [A] until [C]: add nothing to.
18. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Si l’homme d’aage doit encore mesler des affaires, 183D.
19. Lucretius, V, 1126–7; then Erasmus, Apophthegmata, V, Cyrus Major, I.
20. Borrowings here and later from Xenophon’s Hieron (On Kingship), also Ovid, Amores, II, xix, 25–6.
21. Horace, Odes, III, xxix, 12–15.
22. Plato, Gorgias, 468C–469C. Ensuing anecdote: Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VIII, Alphonsus Rex Aragonum, XVII.
23. A slip of memory: Livy says somewhat similar things of the Spanish (XXXVII, 25).
24. Seneca, Epist. moral., XXII, 11. (The Duke of Venice is the Doge.)
25. Seneca (the dramatist), Thyestes, II, i, 30.
26. ’80: follow me, or to draw from it their own individual aggrandisement and advantages. All they say…
27. Ammianus Marcellinus, XXII, 10; of Julian the Apostate.
28. Diocletian’s reluctance to rule was proverbial (cf. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VI, Diocletianus, I). For Anacharsis, cf. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Banquet des sept sages, 155B. (The ensuing anecdote, from Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus.)
29. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, V, Pyrrhus, XXIV; Lucretius, V, 1431–2.
30. Erasmus, Adages, II, IV, XXX, Sui cuique mores fingunt fortunam, citing Cornelius Nepos’ Life of Pomponius Atticus, together with similar sayings of Menander (in Plutarch) and many others.