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1. The phrase ‘under the sun’ occurs as a refrain in Ecclesiastes (and nowhere else in the Bible). On the beams of his library Montaigne inscribed, ‘Omnium quae sub sole sunt fortuna et lex par est, Eccl.ix.’ [Of everything which is under the sun the fortune and law are equal, Ecclesiastes 9.] The word fortuna occurs but once in the Latin Bible (Isaiah 65). Montaigne’s ‘quotation’ is apparently a loose paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 9:2 (Vulgate), 9:3 (AV), ‘Hoc est pessimum inter omnia quae sub sole fiunt, quia eadem cunctis eveniunt.’ [‘Among all things done under the sun, this is the worst: that the same outcome awaits all men.’] Ecclesiastes stresses that you cannot tell from their earthly fate the good from the bad.

2. Lucretius, IV, 936–7. (The theme of the weakness of man was commonplace. Cf. for a comic use of it, Rabelais, Tiers Livre, VIII.)

3. After Guillaume Postel, the Renaissance authority on the Turks.

4. Cicero, De Senectute, X, 34.

5. Herodotus, III, xii.

6. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Dicts notables des Lacedaemoniens, 21OF; Pedro Mexia (tr. Gruget), I, xvi; Silius Italicus, De bello punico, I, 250–1.

7. Plato, Laws, XII, 942D.

8. Stephen Bathory.

9. Pliny, Hist, nat., XXVII, 6.

10. Du Bellay, Mémoires, X.

11. Ovid, Tristia, III, X, 23–4. There follow anecdotes from Livy, Xenophon, Diodorus Siculus and Lopez de Gomara.

12. Xenophon, Anabasis, IV.

13. Diodorus Siculus, Alexander, XVII, xviii.

14. Lopez de Gomara (tr. Fumée). Histoire générale des Indes, II, xxxiii.