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1. A Sorbonne professor was addressed as Magister Noster (‘Our Master’), a title already mocked by Erasmus and in the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum. Schoolmasters were often addressed as Magister by their pupils.
2. Joachim Du Bellay, Regrets – the ‘punchline’ of Sonnet LXVIII.
3. The Roman mob applied those terms to Cicero, according to Plutarch in his Life of Cicero. The words used were Graikos and scholastikos (which Xylander (863B) rendered as Graecus and otiosus, since in Latin otium means both leisure and learned study).
4. Dreadful Latin: cited by the jolly, ignorant Benedictine monk, Frère Jean, in Rabelais (Gargantua, TLF, XXXVII, 95).
5. Perhaps Catherine de Bourbon, sister of Henry of Navarre.
6. A great many changes in [C]. [A] reads: I would like to suggest that our minds are swamped by too much study, just as plants are swamped by too much water: that our minds, seized and encumbered by so many diverse preoccupations…; also: the best scholars…
7. Socrates, for example, was mocked by Aristophanes. The rest of the paragraph paraphrases Plato’s Theaetetus, XXIV, 173–5 in which the speaker is Socrates.
8. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, XIII, viii.
9. Archimedes (in Plutarch’s Life of Marcellus, Xylander, 307B–D).
10. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VII, Crates Thebanus Cynicus, XIII, and Heraclitus Ephesus, XV.
11. Diogenes Laertius, Life of Empedocles; Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VII, Milesii Thaletis, XIX, after Cicero, De divinatione, I, xlix.
12. Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, VI, vii, 5.
13. Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXXVIII, 39, where he values training in virtue well above the liberal and the useful arts.
14. Cicero, Tusc. disput., V, xxxvi, 103 (adapted); Seneca, Epist. moral., CVIII, 37.
15. Seneca, Epist. moral., XXXIII, 7 (adapted).
16. The millionaire Calvisius Sabinus, in Seneca, Epist. moral., XXVII, 5–6.
17. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Comment il faut ouīr, p. 30H.
18. Cicero, Academica, II, i.2. Lucius Lucullus, a tiro in military matters, was dispatched against Mithridates, read up history on the way, and became an outstanding general.
19. Euripides (translated by Montaigne in [B] but not in [C]). From John Stobaeus, III, De Prudentia: Sententiae monostichae.
20. Cicero, De officiis, X, III, xiv, 62; Juvenal, VIII, xiv; Cicero, De finibus, I, i, 3.
21. Not Dionysius but Diogenes: Erasmus, Apophthegmata, III, Diogenes Cynicus, XVI.
22. Plato, Meno, XXVIII, 91.
23. Plato, Protagoras, XVI, 328.
24. Persius, Satires, I, lxi.
25. Adrian Turnebus, for Montaigne, was the scholar ‘who knew everything’, even though he might not be elegant after the style of Castiglione’s famous Book of the Courtier. Cf. II, 12, ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’.
26. Juvenal, Satires, XIV, 35. (Here Titan means Prometheus, the grandson of Titan. He fashioned men from clay and gave them souls made from fire stolen from the heavens.)
27. John Stobaeus, Sententiae, III, De Prudentia: Sententiae monostichae. Translated in the text.
28. Seneca, Epist. moral., CVI, 12.
29. Seneca, Epist. moral., XXXVI, 3–4.
30. Cicero, Tusc. disput., II, iv, 12.
31. Known from Gilles Corrozet, Propos memorables de nobles hommes de la chrestienté.
32. Seneca, Epist. moral., XCV, 13.
33. Plato, Republic, III, 415A.
34. Cicero, De natura deorum, III, xxxi, 77.
35. In his Cyropaedia. Cf. John Stobaeus, Sermo LXXXIV, 30 f.
36. Plato, Alcibiades, I; John Stobaeus, Sermo LXXXIV, 10–20.
37. Xenophon, Cyropaedia, I, iii, 15.
38. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Dicts notables des Lacedaemoniens, 212F.
39. Ibid., 225A.
40. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, I, Agesilaus, XLIX.
41. Plato, Hippias Major, 285; John Stobaeus, De justitia, sermo IX.
42. Several of the above examples are given in the anonymous Tesoro politico and appear to have been well-known at least afterwards.