36

36. On the most excellent of men

[Homer, Alexander the Great and Epaminondas form this most outstanding trio (with Alcibiades as a more attainable model for the average decent man). The praise of Alexander is dominated by one long and grammatically chaotic sentence which betrays both enthusiasm and confusion on Montaigne’s own part. This praise of Alexander towards the end of Book II leads to the criticism of him in the final pages of Book III and helps to emphasize the force of the concluding pages of the Essays.]

[A] If I were to asked my pick of all the men who have come to my notice, I would find three I think who excel all others.

One of them is Homer: it is not that Aristotle or Varro for example might not perhaps have been as learned as he was; not that Virgil may not possibly be compared to him even as an artist: I leave that to be judged by those who know both those poets; I who know only one of them1 may say that as far as I am able to tell the very Muses could not reach further than he did:

[B] Tale facit carmen docta testudine, quale Cynthius impositis temperat articulis.

[On his learned lyre he sings verses such as Cynthian Apollo chants when he attunes his strings to his plucking fingers.]2

[A] However in making such a judgement I should never overlook that it is from Homer, his guide and his teacher, that Virgil derives his skill, nor that one single incident in the Iliad supplied the bulk of the material for that great and divine Aeneid. But that is not the way I do my sums. I marshal other qualities, ones which make that great Homer amazing to me, as though he were above our human condition. And in truth I am often struck with wonder that he, who by his authority created so many gods and made them honoured in this world, has not himself been deified. Poor and blind, living as he did before learning had been codified into rules and definite precepts, he had mastered it all so well that those who have subsequently undertaken to establish forms of government, to conduct wars or to write on religion and on philosophy – [C] no matter what School they belong to – [A] or about the arts and crafts, have accepted him as their master, most perfect in all things, and taken his books as a seed-bed for every kind of knowledge.

Qui quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non, Plenius ac melius Chrysippo ac Crantore dicit.

[Better and more fully than Chrysippus and Crantor he teaches us what beauty is, what ugliness, what is profitable, what is not.]

And another poet says:

A quo, ceu fonte perenni, Vatum Pyeriis labra rigantur aquis.

[From his unfailing stream the poets come and wet their lips in the Pierian waters.]

Yet another:

Adde Heliconiadum comites, quorum unus Homerus Astra potitus.

[To these add those companions of the Muses, among whom Homer alone was made into a star.]

And one more:

Cujusque ex ore profuso Omnis posteritas latices in carmina duxit, Amnemque in tenues ausa est deducere rivos, Unius fæcunda bonis.

[From whose abundant source all posterity have drawn their songs, dividing his one river into their many rivulets, each poet rich in the wealth of one single man.]3

It was against the order of Nature for Homer to have brought forth the most [C] excellent [A] work there can ever be. In Nature’s order things are imperfect at birth: they grow up, and become stronger as they grow. He made the childhood of poetry and of several other arts to be adult, complete and mature. That is why, following that beautiful testimony to him which Antiquity has bequeathed to us, he can be called ‘the first poet and the last’: since before him there was none whom he could imitate: after him, none who could imitate him. According to Aristotle, his words alone have properties of movement and of action: they are the only words which are endowed with substance.4 When Alexander the Great came across a costly jewel-box among the spoils of Darius, he commanded that it be set aside for him to keep his copy of Homer in, saying that it was his best and most faithful counsellor on the subject of armies. For the same reason Cleomenes son of Anaxandridas said that Homer was the poet of the Spartans, since he was an excellent instructor in the art of warfare. There has also come down to us a unique and individual tribute: in Plutarch’s judgement he is the only author in the world who has never sated his readers nor grown insipid to them, since he ever seems different to them, ever blossoming into new graces. That whimsical Alcibiades asked a man with pretentions to culture to show him his Homer: when he could not produce one he boxed his ears – it would be like finding one of our priests with no breviary! Xenophanes once complained to Hiero, the Tyrant of Syracuse, that he was too poor to provide for two servants: ‘How is that?’ he replied: ‘Homer was far poorer than you yet, dead though he is, he provides grist for over ten thousand!’ [C] And what more could be said when Panaetius called Plato ‘the Homer of the Philosophers?’5

[A] Besides, what renown can be compared with his? Nothing lives like his fame and his works on the lips of men: nothing is so known or accepted as Troy, Helen and Homer’s wars – though they may never have existed. Our children are still given names which he invented over three thousand years ago. Who has not heard of Hector and Achilles? Not only individual families but most of the nations seek their origins in what Homer created. When Mahomet II, the Turkish Emperor, wrote to our Pope Pius II, he said, ‘I am amazed that the Italians should band against me, since we both have a common origin in the Trojans and, like the Italians, I have an interest in avenging the blood of Hector on the Greeks whom they are supporting against me.’6 Homer provides a noble farce in which over the centuries Kings, Republics and Emperors all play their parts and for which this great universe serves as the theatre.

Seven towns of Greece squabbled over his birthplace, so much honour was brought him by his obscure origins:

Smyrna, Rhodos, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athenae.[Smyrna, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos and Athens.]

My second example is Alexander the Great.

For let a man consider Alexander’s age when he set out on his expeditions; the meagre resources with which he achieved so glorious a design; the authority he won as a mere boy over so many of the greatest and most experienced Captains in the world who followed him; the extraordinary favour with which Fortune embraced him and favoured his hazardous – I almost said rash – exploits:

[B] impellens quicquid sibi summa petenti Obstaret, gaudensque viam fecisse ruina;

[toppling everything in the way of his ambition, glorying in marking his route with destruction;]7

[A] his greatness in having passed victorious through all this inhabitable earth by the age of thirty-three; [B] his having attained, in but half a lifespan, the ultimate limit of human nature, so that you cannot imagine him living the normal span or continuing to grow in virtue or good fortune to the natural term of a man’s life without imagining something surpassing our humanity; [A] his making so many royal branches sprout from among his soldiers; the world divided at his death among his four successors – simple Captains in his armies whose descendants subsequently long endured, maintaining such great dominions – let a man consider so many excellent virtues in him, [B] justice, temperance, liberality, faithfulness to his word; love for his people, humanity towards the vanquished [A] for his character seems to have justly been beyond reproach [B], though not some of his rarer, untypical, isolated actions: but it is not possible to head such great movements and always act according to the rules of justice: men such as he need to be judged overall, by the dominant aim of their activities: his destruction of Thebes and the murders of Menander, of the doctor Ephestion, of so many Persian prisoners at one stroke, of a troop of Indian soldiers (not without impugning his pledged word), of the Cosseians, including their children, are ecstasies a little hard to excuse; but in the case of Clytus he made amends far beyond the gravity of the offence – and that action as much as any other bears witness to a generous complexion, which was a complexion excellently formed for goodness: [C] it was cleverly said of him that he owed his virtues to Nature, his vices to Fortune; [B] as for the fact that he was a bit of a boaster, a bit too impatient of hearing ill said of himself, and that he scattered his mangers, arms and bridle-bits all over India, well, that kind of thing seems pardonable to me in a man of his age and of his [C] strangely [A] prosperous Fortune); whoever will also at the same time reflect on his many military virtues – speed, foresight, endurance, self-discipline, subtlety, magnanimity, resolve, good luck – in which he was the first among men (even if Hannibal had not pointed it out to us); [A] the rare beauty and endowments of his person which touched the miraculous; [B] his carriage and that venerable bearing of his beneath a face so young,8 so flushed with radiance –

Qualis, ubi Oceani perfusus sus lucifer unda, Quem Venus ante alios astrorum diligit ignes, Extulit os sacrum cælo, tenebrasque resolvit;

[Shining like that morning star which Venus loves above all others when, bathed in Ocean’s waves, it raises up its sacred face in the heavens and drives away the darkness;]

[A] the excellence of his knowledge and his capacities; the duration and grandeur of his glory, pure as it was, free from spot or envy; [B] the fact that long after his death it was a pious belief to hold that his medallions brought good luck to those who wore them; that more kings and princes have written of his deeds than other historians have written of any king or prince that has ever been; [C] that even today the Mahometans who despise all other biographies accept and honour his alone by a special dispensation: [A] let a man consider all that and he will admit, if he lumps it all together, that I was right to prefer Alexander even to Caesar, who alone was able to make me hesitate over my choice. [B] It cannot be denied that there is more of Caesar in Caesar’s exploits: more of Fortune in Alexander’s. [A] In many things they were equal; Caesar may even have been greater in a few.

[B] They were two conflagrations, two torrents, flooding through the world in divers places:

Et velut immissi diversis partibus ignes Arentem in silvam et virgulta sonantia lauro; Aut ubi decursu rapido de montibus altis Dant sonitum spumosi amnes et in æquora currunt, Quisque suum populatus iter.

[Like two forest-fires raging in different parts of a dry forest of laurel trees full of crackling twigs; or like two foaming torrents rushing down the mountain-sides with a roar, charging across the plains, having swept away everything before them.]9

But even if Caesar’s ambition were more moderate, it was still disastrous: it had as its vile objective the collapse of his country and the debasement of the entire world, so that, [A] when all is put together and weighed in the balance, I cannot do other than to come down on the side of Alexander.

My third example, and to my mind the most distinguished, is Epaminondas.10

As for glory, he is far from having such renown as the others (nor is glory a quality of the substance of anything); as for resolution and valour – not the kind which is sharpened by ambition but the kind which wisdom and reason can implant in a well-ordered soul – he had all that can ever be imagined. As for proof of his valour, he provided as much of it in my judgement as even Alexander and Caesar; for though his exploits in war were neither so numerous nor so grandiose, if you consider them thoroughly and in all their circumstances, they do not cease, for all that, to be any less weighty or impressive; they provide equal proof of [C] bravery and [A] military skill. The Greeks did him the honour of unanimously naming him the first man among them; but to be first among the Greeks is to be easily the best in the world. As for his knowledge and skill, an ancient verdict has come down to us, that never did man know more nor talk less. [C] For he belonged to the Pythagorean School. What he did say, no one put better: an excellent and very convincing orator.

[A] But as for his morals and his sense of right and wrong, he far surpassed in that all those who have ever engaged in the affairs of state. For in that quality (which we must consider to be the principal one, [C] which alone truly reveals what we are and which, all by itself, outweighs for me all the other qualities put together) [A] he yields to no philosopher whatsoever, not even to Socrates himself. [B] In Epaminondas integrity is the dominant quality proper to him, constant, equable, incorruptible. Against his standard, the sense of right and wrong in Alexander seems subordinate, hesitant, spasmodic, weak and subject to chance.

[C] In Antiquity’s judgement anyone who studied all the other Captains in the smallest detail would find in each of them one special quality which rendered him illustrious; but in Epaminondas alone there is virtue ever abundant, an unchanging competence which never leaves anything to be desired in any of a man’s duties in this life, whether in political or private occupations, in peace or in war, or, when it comes to dying, in greatness and glory. I know of no man’s form or fortune that I can regard with such honour and love. It is true that I find his stubbornly persisting in poverty as portrayed by his best friends somewhat over-scrupulous. That action alone, sublime and most admirable though it be, is rather too grim, I feel, for me even to wish that I could desire to imitate it.

Only one man could make me hesitate in his case: Scipio Aemilianus – if we could provide him with as proud and illustrious an end and with as deep and universal a knowledge of the arts and the sciences.11 What a grievous loss to me it is that Time has robbed our eyes of precisely the foremost parallel lives, the lives of the noblest pair in Plutarch, those of these two great men who were, respectively, by common consent, the greatest of the Greeks and the greatest of the Romans. What a subject! And what a craftsman!

For a man who was no saint but (as they say) a gentlemanly kind of fellow, with the manners of a good public figure and citizen who was moderately distinguished, the most richly varied life that I know to have been lived (as we say) among the living, a life crammed with splendid and desirable qualities is (all things considered and to my liking) that of Alcibiades.

But to return to Epaminondas, [A] I would like to cite a few of his opinions so as to provide an example of his excellent goodness.

[B] He swore that the greatest satisfaction he ever had in his life was to have given pleasure to his father and mother by his victory at Leuctra. It is greatly to his favour that he should prefer their pleasure in such a glorious battle to his own full and rightful pleasure in it.

[A] He did not think it was permissible to kill any man without understanding why, not even to restore freedom to one’s country. That explains why he was so cold towards the campaign to deliver Thebes led by his companion Pelopidas. He also held that in battle a man should spare anyone he loves on the opposing side and fly from encounters with him. [C] His humane treatment of his enemies as well made him suspect to the Boeotians: he had by some miracle forced the Spartans to open to him at Morea (near Corinth) a pass which they had taken up arms to defend; he was content to strike straight through their middle without hounding them to death. For that he was relieved of his post as Captain-General – very honourably so, seeing that it was for such a cause, and also because the Boeotians were soon shamed by the necessity of having to reinstate him and to admit how much their glory and their safety were due to him, since whenever he led his forces victory followed him like a shadow.12

The prosperity of his country died as it had been born: with him.