32

32. In defence of Seneca and Plutarch

[In this chapter Montaigne reveals not only how he reads his books but dares to give the great Bodin, the author of the famous Method for studying history, lesson in historical interpretation. That makes this one of his more personally revealing chapters, as well as once again emphasizing Montaigne’s lasting preoccupation with philosophical and moral ecstasy.]

[A] My intimacy with those two great men and the help they give to me in my old age, [C] as well as to my book which is built entirely out of their spoils, [A] bind me to espouse their honour.

As for Seneca, among the thousands of little pamphlets that those of the Religion Allegedly Reformed1 circulate in defence of their cause (which come sometimes from the hands of good writers which It is a pity not to find occupied on a better subject) I saw one, long ago, which extended and filled out the similitude it intended to establish between the rule of our poor late King Charles IX and that of Nero, by comparing the late Cardinal of Lorraine to Seneca – including their destinies (which made them both first men in the governments of their monarchs) their morals, endowments and conduct.2 In this, in my opinion, he does too much honour to my Lord the Cardinal; for while I am one of those who rate highly his intelligence, his eloquence, his zeal for religion and for the King’s service as well as his good fortune in being born in an age when it was so new, so rare and so necessary for the public good to have a great Churchman of such nobility, so worthy and capable of his office: nevertheless, to tell the truth, I do not think that his ability was anywhere near Seneca’s nor that his virtue was as pure and as inflexible as his.

Now that pamphlet which I am talking talking about,3 so as to attain its purpose, has a description (which is deeply insulting) borrowed from the strictures on Seneca by Dion the historian, whose testimony I simply do not believe; for Dion, apart from being inconsistent in first calling Seneca very wise and also a mortal enemy of Nero’s vices, nevertheless makes him mean, given to usury, ambitious, cowardly, pleasure-seeking and a counterfeit philosopher under false colours. Seneca’s virtue is so evidently alive and vigorous in his writings, which themselves provide such a manifest defence against such insinuations as his being excessively rich and spendthrift, that I could never accept any witness to the contrary. Moreover in matters such as these it is more reasonable to trust the Roman historians than foreign Greek ones.4 Now Tacitus speaks most honourably of his life and of his death, portraying him in all things as a great man, most excellent and most virtuous. And it will be enough for me to make no criticism but this of Dion’s power of judgement – an unavoidable one: his judgement of matters Roman was so diseased that he ventured to champion the causes of Julius Caesar against Pompey, and of Antony against Cicero.

Now for Plutarch.

Jean Bodin is a good contemporary author, endowed with far better judgement than the mob of scribblers of his time: he merits our own considered judgement. I find him a bit rash in that passage of his Method of History where he accuses Plutarch not only of ignorance (on that he can say what he likes: I do not hunt that game) but also of frequently writing ‘things which are incredible and entirely fabulous’ (those are his very words).5 If he had simply said ‘things otherwise than they are’, that would have been no great censure, since we have to take on trust from the hands of others things we have not ourselves witnessed, and I can see that he occasionally relates the same event differently, well aware that he is doing so: for example, the judgement of the three best Captains that there ever were, which Hannibal made, appears differently in his life of Flaminius and in his life of Pyrrhus. But to charge him with having accepted as valid currency things unbelievable and impossible is to accuse the most judicious author in the world of lack of judgement.

Here is Bodin’s example. ‘As,’ he says, ‘when he relates that a Spartan boy allowed his entire stomach to be torn out by a fox-cub which he had stolen and kept hidden under his tunic until he died rather than reveal his theft.’ In the first place I find that a badly chosen example, since it is hard indeed to prescribe limits to the powers of the faculties of our souls, whereas in the case of bodily strength we have more means of knowing them and of setting bounds to them. For that reason if I had to choose an example I would rather have taken one from the second category, where some facts are harder to believe – among others what he narrates about Pyrrhus: that, gravely wounded as he was, he gave so great a blow with his sword to an enemy clad in full armour that, from the top of his head downwards, he clove him in two.

In Bodin’s own example I find no great miracle; nor do I accept the excuse that he makes for Plutarch, that he added the words ‘So they say’, to warn us to keep a bridle on our credulity. For apart from such things as are accepted on the authority of Antiquity or out of respect for religion, Plutarch would not himself have accepted to believe things intrinsically incredible nor would he have proposed that we should. And as for the phrase, ‘So they say’, he does not employ it in this context with that sense: that is easy to see, since he relates elsewhere other examples touching the powers of endurance of the boys of Sparta which happened in his own time and which are even harder to accept, such as the one to which Cicero bore witness before him, having, he says, been there himself: some boys were undergoing that test of endurance by which the Spartans assayed them before the altar of Diana; they allowed themselves to be flogged until they were all over blood, without uttering cry or groan, some having sufficient strength of will to lose their lives there.6

Then there is the one which Plutarch relates with a hundred other witnesses; during the sacrifice a hot coal slipped up the sleeve of a Spartan boy while he was swinging the incense; he let the whole of his arm be burnt until the smell of cooked flesh reached the congregation.

By Spartan custom nothing more directly affected your reputation nor made you suffer more shame and disgrace than being caught out stealing.7 I am so imbued with the greatness of those men of Sparta that not only does it not seem incredible to me as it does to Bodin: it does not even seem rare or unusual. [C] The history of Sparta is full of hundreds of harsher and rarer examples: by Bodin’s standards it is all miracle. [A] On this subject of theft, Marcellinus reports that nobody in his time had yet found any kind of torture which could force any Egyptians surprised in this crime to tell you even their own name.8

[B] A Spanish peasant who was put to the rack to make him reveal his accomplices in the murder of the praetor Lucius Piso yelled out in the midst of his tortures that his friends should not go away but stay and watch in full confidence, since it was not in the power of pain to force a single word of confession from him. And on the first day that was all they did get out of him. The next day, as they were escorting him back to start torturing him again, he struggled violently in the hands of his guards and killed himself by bashing his head against a wall.

[C] Epicharis, having glutted and exhausted the cruelty of Nero’s attendants and withstood for one full day their burning brands, their beatings and their instruments of torture without revealing a word of her conspiracy, was brought back to the rack the next day with her limbs all shattered: she slipped the cord from her dress through the arm of a chair, made a running knot, thrust her head through it and hanged herself by the weight of her body. Having as she did the courage to die thus after having endured those first tortures, does she not appear to have deliberately lent herself to that trial of her endurance in order to mock that tyrant and to encourage others to make a plot against him similar to her own?

[A] And if anyone would go and ask our mounted riff-raff about the experiences which they have had in these civil wars of ours, he will hear of acts of endurance, of obstinate resistance and of stubbornness even among that rabble – effeminate though it is with a more than Egyptian sensuality9 – worthy of being compared which we have just rehearsed of Spartan valour.

I know that there are cases of simple peasants who were prepared to allow the soles of their feet to be burnt, their fingertips to be smashed with the butt of a pistol, their eyes to be forced all bloody from their sockets by having a thick cord twisted tight around their foreheads, before they would even think about putting themselves to ransom. I myself saw one who was left for dead, naked in a ditch, with his neck all swollen and bruised by a halter which still dangled down from it and by which he had been dragged all night behind a horse, his body stabbed through by daggers in a hundred places – not to kill him but to make him feel pain and fear – and who had suffered all that until he had lost all power of speech, all consciousness, determined (as he told me) to die a thousand deaths (as indeed, so far as suffering is concerned, he had died one whole death already) rather than promise them anything; yet he was one of the richest husbandmen of the entire region. How many have we seen patiently suffering to be roasted or burnt for opinions which, without understanding or knowledge, they have taken from others!

[B] I have known hundreds and hundreds of women (for they say that Gascon heads have some special gift for this) whom you would have more easily made to bite a red-hot iron than made to let go of an opinion conceived in a fit of choler once they have got their teeth into it. Women are rendered intractable by blows and constraint. That man who forged the tale of the goodwife who would not stop calling her husband lice-ridden however much she suffered correction by threats and cudgelings, who was thrown into a pond and, even while she was drowning, thrust her hands out of the water high above her head and made the sign for squashing lice, forged indeed a tale the express image of which we can see every day in the stubbornness of women.10 And stubbornness is the sister of constancy, in vigour and inflexibility at least.

[A] We must not judge what is possible and impossible according to what seems credible or incredible to our own minds (as I have said elsewhere). It is nevertheless a major fault into which most people fall – [C] and I do not say that of Bodin – [A] to make difficulties about believing of another anything which they could not [C] or would not [A] do themselves.11 It seems to each man that the master Form of Nature is in himself, as a touchstone by which he may compare all the other forms. Activities which do not take his form as their model are feigned and artificial. What brute-like stupidity! I consider some men, particularly among the Ancients, to be way above me and even though I clearly realize that I am powerless to follow them on my feet I do not give up following them with my eyes and judging the principles which raise them thus aloft, principles the seeds of which I can just perceive in myself, as I also can that ultimate baseness in minds which no longer amazes me and which I do not refuse to believe in either. I can clearly see the spiral by which those great souls wind themselves higher. [A] I admire the greatness of those souls; those ecstasies which I find most beautiful I clasp unto me; though my powers do not reach as far, at least my judgement is most willingly applied to them.

The other example which Bodin cites of ‘things which are incredible and entirely fabulous’ in Plutarch is the statement that Agesilaus was condemned to pay a fine by the Ephors for having attracted to himself the hearts and minds of his fellow-citizens. I do not know what mark of falsehood he discovers in that, but at any rate Plutarch on this occasion was writing of things which must have been far better known to him than to us, and it was no novelty in Greece for men to be punished and exiled merely because they were too well-liked by their citizens: witness their ostracism and their petalism.12

In the same passage there is another accusation which irritates me on Plutarch’s behalf: it is where Bodin says that Plutarch showed good faith in his parallels between Roman and Roman or Greek and Greek but not between Roman and Greek. Witness, he says, Demosthenes and Cicero; Cato and Aristides; Sylla and Lysander; Marcellus and Pelopidas; Pompey and Agesilaus, reckoning as he does that he favoured the Greeks by matching them so unfairly. That is precisely to attack what is most excellent and commendable in Plutarch: for in those parallel lives (which are the most admirable part of his works and to my mind the one he took most pleasure in) the faithfulness and purity of his judgements equals their weight and profundity. He is a philosopher who teaches us what virtue is. Let us see whether we can save him from this accusation of falsehood and prevarication.

The only thing I can think of which can have given occasion for Bodin’s judgement is that great and dazzling lustre of the Roman names which we have in our heads. It does not seem possible to us that Demosthenes could ever equal the glory of a man who was Consul, Proconsul and Quaestor of that great Republic. But whoever would consider the truth of the matter and the men themselves (which was Plutarch’s chief aim, namely to weigh against each other their morals, their natures, their competencies rather than their destinies) will find, I think, contrary to Bodin, that Cicero and the Elder Cato weigh lighter than their parallels.

For Bodin’s purpose I would have chosen the parallel between Cato the Younger and Phocion: for in that pair there could with verisimilitude be found an inequality – to the advantage in the Roman.

As for Marcellus, Sylla and Pompey, I quite see that their exploits in war are more expansive, more glorious and more splendid than those of the Greeks whom Plutarch puts in parallel to them; but, no less in war as elsewhere, the most beautiful and most virtuous deeds are not always the most celebrated ones. I often find the names of Captains overshadowed by the splendour of other names of lesser merit: witness Labienus, Ventidius, Telesinus and many others. And if I had to look at things in such a way as to complain on behalf of the Greeks, might I not say that Camillus is far less to be compared to Themistocles; the Gracchi to Agis and Cleomenes; Numa to Lycurgus?

But it is lunacy to wish to judge from one aspect things which present so many facets. When Plutarch compares men he does not thereby make them equal. Who could ever bring out their differences more clearly and conscientiously! When he comes to match the victories, the martial exploits and the might of the armies led by Pompey, and his triumphs, against those of Agesilaus, this is what he says: ‘I do not believe that even Xenophon, had he been alive, would have dared to judge them comparable to those of Agesilaus, even if he had been allowed to write all he wished in his favour.’ Does he talk of matching Lysander to Sylla? ‘There is,’ he says, ‘no comparison, neither in the number of victories nor the hazards run in battle: for Lysander only won two naval victories…’ and so on.

In that, he is not cheating the Romans out of anything: he cannot have wronged them merely by placing them beside the Greeks, no matter what disparity there was between them. Plutarch does not weigh them in the lump; he does not prefer one to the other over all: one after the other he matches piece against piece, circumstance against circumstance. So if you wanted to convict him of partiality you would have to take one particular judgement of his and tease it out or else make a general criticism: that he was wrong to match this Roman against that Greek since there were others which more closely resembled each other and were better fitted for comparison.