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1. ’80: impeded, no matter how good a will she may have. That…

2. Lucretius, III, 942–3.’80: that monster Caligula…

3. Seneca, De tranquillitate, XIV; Lucan, Pharsalia, VIII, 636.

4. Torquato Tasso, Gierusalemme liberata; XII; lines from stanzas 74 and 26.

5. Lucretius, III, 485–9.

6. Ovid, Tristia, I, iii, 12.

7. Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 702.

8. Virgil, Aeneid, X, 396.

9. Lucretius, III, 642–5.

10. ’80: action as pleasant as that was…

11. Ovid, Tristia, I, iii, 14.

12. Cf. Pliny, cited Erasmus, Adages, I, VII, XCIV, In tuum ipsius sinum inspue.

13. It is not certain who these ‘two or three Ancients’ were. They may have included Lucillius, the ‘father of satire’.

14. Horace, Ars poetica, 31.

15. Montaigne may be thinking, among other works, of St Augustine’s Confessions, but there are signs that he never read that particular work, though one would have expected him to have done so.

16. The Reformed Church rejected private confession to priests but encouraged a sinner to confess his sins to the assembled Church.

17. Montaigne’s gibe is unfair. Quintus Hortensius was a famous orator of Cicero’s time; Cicero named his treatise on oratory after him. Quintilian (XI, iii, 8) held his oratory to be inferior to Cicero’s.

18. Socrates maintained that men should be concerned not with cosmology but with self-knowledge and morals. He followed Apollo’s revealed commandment, ‘Know Thyself’. (Cf. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, III, Socratica, XII and XXXVI; Adages, I, VI, XCV, Nosce teipsum.)