Page 1173
1. ’88: our tastes and practices…
2. ’88: reproach and insult? Socrates…
3. Lucan, Pharsalia, II, 381–2, praising Cato.
4. ’88: about either for judging or comparing. He was…
5. In the Renaissance this was summed up in the Socratic adage, Quae supra nos, nihil ad nos (What is above us is nothing to do with us). As Erasmus points out (I; VI; LXIX) the early Christian writer Lucius Lactantius considered it to be ‘famous and approved by all’.
6. Seneca, Epist. moral., CVI, 12.
7. Tacitus, Agricola, I, x.
8. The notion that the soul, like the body, needs pabulum (food, nourishment) is Platonic.
9. Christian ‘fools’ often combined real or pretended ignorance and madness with their other ascetic ideals and practices. An echo of Matthew 5:3, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ (i.e., the foolish).
10. Cf. for example the adages of Erasmus mentioned in III, 9, ‘On vanity’, note 160.
11. ’88: what is common and natural is vain and superfluous…Then, Seneca, Epist. moral., CVI, 11 (adapted).
12. [B] instead of [C]: philosopher. Erudition, while making an assay…
13. Cicero, Tusc. disput., V, v, B (criticizing Stoic arguments); Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXV, 5 (adapted).
14. ’88: His burning emotion, so animated, show that…In [C], Seneca, Epist. moral., CXV, 2, and CXIV, 3; in both cases contrasting mere words and style with solid moral action.
15. ’88: more pointed, puts in the goad…
16. ’88: more solid, constantly…
17. Such temptations as St Jerome in the desert or the fearsome hallucinations of St Antony.
18. ’88: such subtleties and learned maxims…
19. Seneca, Epist. moral., XCV, B.
20. Attributed by Marie de Gournay to ‘Seneca’s Epistles’, but untraced. Then, Ovid, Ex Ponto, I, iii, 57–8.
21. Source unknown; then, Virgil, Aeneid, XII, 46; Catullus, Epithalamia Thetis et Pelei, 406–7.
22. Doubtless an echo of the saying of Alcibiades that an army should be organized under a Head, as is the human body.
23. Virgil, Georgics, I, 500, applied almost certainly by Montaigne to the then Protestant Henry of Navarre, who, as the Roman Catholic Henri Quatre, did indeed bring comparative peace and moral government to France.
24. Both cited by Justus Lipsius, Politici, V, xiii.
25. Plutarch, Life of Brutus.
26. Plato, Utters, VII, 331.
27. How far man should ‘work together’ with God is a major theological problem, much quarrelled over during the Renaissance. Montaigne gives the prime and indispensable role to divine grace but expects man to work together with God. His theology is orthodox, as is his treating Plato as a pagan – for Erasmus he was a proto-Christian.
28. Sedition is a sin for Christians. St Paul classifies ‘seditions’ with ‘heresies’ as works of the flesh (Galatians 5:20).
29. In Roman Law parricide was not limited to killing fathers but used of all foul murders to mark the height of their impiety. (Cf. Spiegel’s Lexicon juris civilis.)
30. Livy, XXXIX, xvi; then, Plato, Republic, II, 361 A. (Cf. Cicero, De officiis, I, xiii, 41.)
31. Virgil, Eclogues, I, 11–12; then, Ovid, Tristia, III, x, 65–6, and Claudianus, In Eutropium, I, 244.
32. Montaigne lived in a region dominated by the Reformed Church; he was an active Roman Catholic who never hid his allegiance.
33. ’88: unspoken and hidden suspicions, for which…
34. Montaigne’s term conscience, like conscientia often in Latin, means not conscience here but a good conscience, the consciousness of having done right. In Montaigne as in the Renaissance generally it rarely means what it now does in English.
35. Cicero, De nat. deorum, III, iv, 9 (applied when a case is self-evident).
36. Horace, Epistles, I, xviii, 107–8.
37. Seneca, Epist. moral., XC, 34.
38. Livy, XXX, xliv.
39. ’88: Of course I do. But as…
40. ’88: strange and unheard of effects… Then, Horace, Odes, I, xxviii, 11–12.
41. Virgil, Georgia, III, 476–7.
42. ’88: make us taste death quite differently…
43. Diodorus Siculus, XVII, xxiii.
44. Livy, XXII, li.
45. Echo of Plutarch (tr. Amyot), De l’amour envers les enfans, 100 F. (Also the general influence of Que les bestes brutes usent de raison, 271 A–273 G).
46. A tiro (a recruit or beginner) practises (meditat) the difficulties he must overcome. Cf. note 56, below. Two clauses of Seneca conflated: Epist. moral., XCI, 8; CVII, 4: (Here begins a major rejection of aspects of Seneca’s stoicism.)
47. Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXIV, 4: Seneca used against himself.
48. ’88: especially all such ills as may befall you, at least the more extreme ones.
49. Seneca, Epist. moral., XIII, 12–13; 10; XXIV, 2 (conflated).
50. Virgil, Georgics, I, 123.
51. Quintilian, I, xii, 11.
52. Seneca, Epist. moral., XXX, 7.
53. Propertius, II, xxvii, 1–2 (adapted); then Pseudo-Gallus, Elegeia, I, 277–8.
54. Cicero, Tusc. disput., I, xxx, 74. Cicero is citing Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus, 67 D, but changes melētema, ‘practising’ dying, into commentatio, a ‘diligent meditation’ upon dying. Montaigne is correcting in the light of experience what he wrote in I, 20, ‘To philosophize is to learn how to die’. He now believes that most of mankind should neither ‘practise’ dying nor ‘meditate’ upon dying.
55. Horace, Epistles, I, i, 15.
56. Suetonius, Life of Caesar, lxxxvii. In 1588 Montaigne wrote ‘… by death itself and his long premeditation. That is why Caesar opined that the happiest and least burdensome death is the least premeditated.’ In [C] Montaigne twice replaces the notion of ‘premeditation’ by words which cannot evoke the philosophical meaning of praemeditatio, that is, an advance ‘practising’ of death in rapture or ecstasy. (Cf. the final pages of the last chapter, III, 13, ‘On experience’.) The quotation is from Seneca, Epist. moral., XCVIII, 8.
57. ’88: endure ills, which is greater than ours… insensitivity and beast-like understanding…
58. ’88: some more inner knowledge…
59. ’88: good or evil. You will therefore issue such orders as you like. As a plea…In [C] Montaigne’s Socrates stresses that he should be treated secundum se, ‘in keeping’ with his deeds and character.
60. Based on Plato’s Apology for Socrates. Cicero resumes it, with eulogies, in De Oratore I, liv, 232. (Cf. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, III, Socratica, LXVI.) Honoured guests were lodged, wined and dined in the Pyrtaneum. The quotation from Homer is from the Odyssey, XIX, 163, cited by Socrates, Apology, 23 B.
61. ’88: not child-like, unimaginably sublime…
62. Cicero, De oratore, cited in note 60.
63. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), De l’envie et de la haine, 108 EF.
64. ’88: exhibits Nature’s primary concept. While…
65. ’88: the task of this world…Then, Lucretius, II, 74; Ovid, Fasti, I, 330.
66. ’88: lives. Let us look at the beasts: one can see…
67. ’88: while swans celebrate it but even… (The swan-song, sung at death, has become proverbial. Erasmus, Adages, I, II, LV, Cygnea Cantio.)
68. Antiquity generally denied that the beasts have reason as Man has. The Roman populace believed however that elephants in the gladiatorial arena sometimes asked to die (cf. Chanet, De l’instinct et la connaissance des animaux, La Rochelle, 1640, p. 178).
69. ’88: enough to enrich this treatise…
70. In Plato’s dialogue bearing that name.
71. Probably not an exaggeration. Such legal works cited legal authorities and maxims by the hundreds.
72. [B] in place of [C] to the end of the paragraph: I conceal my larcenies and disguise them: others put their larcenies on parade and into their accounts: thereby acquiring a better claim in law than I do; like those who disguise horses I stain their mane and their tail, and sometimes I poke out an eye: if their first master used them as amblers I make them trot; if used for the saddle, I use them for packs. If I had wanted…
73. ’88: seventy…
74. [B], instead of [C]: mind, it is not credible that such dissonance should occur without some accident which ruptured the normal development. As Socrates said…
75. Cicero, Tusc. disput., I, xxxiii, 80.
76. Socrates’ famous reply to Zopyrus the physiognomist: he was indeed born with lecherous tendencies but had re-formed his soul. (Cicero, De fato, V, 10; Tusc. disput., IV, 80; Erasmus, Apophthegmata, III, Socratica, LXXX. Cf. above, III, 5, ‘On some lines of Virgil’, note 163.)
77. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VII, Aristoteles Stagirites, XV: ‘ “Beauty,” he said, “is more efficacious than any written testimonial.” Some attribute that [not to Aristotle but] to Diogenes. Aristotle used to call beauty “a gift”, because it approached the nature of grace. Socrates called it “a brief tyranny”, because the grace of beauty soon wilted; Plato, a “privilege of nature” because it came to few. Theophrastus called it “a silent deception”, since it persuaded without words; Theocritus an “ivory harm” since, though it was fair to view, it was the cause of many inconveniences; Carneades “a kingdom without protection”, since the beautiful obtain whatever they will, no force impeding them. [Diogenes] Laertius relates this.’ (In the City of God, XV, xxii, St Augustine makes beauty a gift of God, given to both good and evil persons.)
78. Cited probably after Erasmus by Tiraquellus (De legibus connubialibus, II, 61), with reference to Quintilian, Athenaeus, Pausanias, Diodorus Siculus, Propertius, etc., etc. That Phryne’s parting her garment to reveal her bosom was more effective than the best rhetoric became proverbial.
79. The term kalokagathos in Greek combined kalos (beautiful) and agathos (good). ‘Beautiful’ is used, rather, for ‘good’ in the Greek Bible: e.g. the ‘good’ fish in Matthew 13:48 which were gathered into vessels while the bad were cast away are termed ta kala (the ‘beautiful’ ones); similarly the ‘good’ seed in the parable of the sower is kalon sperma (‘beautiful’ seed). There are many other examples, especially in the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, of which Montaigne possessed a copy).
80. Plato, Corgias, VII, 452.
81. Diogenes Laertius, Life of Aristotle, V, 20. Cf. H. Estienne’s Apophthegmata, s.v. Aristoteles.
82. This was the aim of the art or science of physiognomy, highly developed during the Renaissance.
83. ’88: such questions I leave undecided…
84. The great precept of Classical philosophy. Cf. Cicero, Laelius, V, 19; XII, 42.
85. ’88: my natural complexions by education and the power of reason…
86. ’88:1 have a face which is…
87. Terence, Heautontimorumenos, I, i, 42; Pseudo-Gallus, I, 238.
88. ’88: air and bearing have put…
89. ’88: dead and defeated, having been come across when in disorder and widely separated from each other. Very naively…
90. ’88: my house, notwithstanding the vain truce in which we then were, might be…
91. ’88: Fortune wiser than me. There…
92. ’88: masked gentlemen, well mounted and well armed, followed…
93. Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 261.
94. Catullus, LXVI, 65.
95. ’88: ride over to me, no longer with his threats but with words full of courtesy, putting…
96. ’88: find them, the principal ones of which he returned to me, not excluding my purse and my strong-box…
97. ’88: his name. (I would love, in my turn, to assay what expression he would show in a similar event.) He then…
98. ’88: other and worse dangers which…
99. Not identified by Marie de Gournay or others. (The general theme is that of Tiraquellus in De poenis legum temporandis.)
100. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VII, Aristoteles Stagirites V.
101. ’88:I am only. Knave of Clubs…The gentleman in Montaigne had second thoughts about the term varlet (knave) even when used in a metaphor, so he replaced varlet by escuyer, squire (a knight’s attendant). Both terms were used more or less indifferently, just as we use both Jack and Knave for the playing-cards.
102. Plutarch puts the contrasting point of view in his Life of Lycurgus, iv. On other occasions he condemns Charillus: cf. De l’envie et de la haine, 108 C; Les dicts notables des Lacedaemoniens, 215 D; Comment on pourra discerner le flatteur d’avec l’amy, 44 B. Erasmus (Apophthegmata, I, Archidamas, XXXVIII) also blames it, adding, ‘That outstanding man Archidamas perceived that mercy needs to be associated with justice. Otherwise what is a prince’s leniency towards offenders but cruelty toward the good?’