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1. The opening sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
2. Manilius, Astronomica, I, 62–3.
3. ’88: weaker and baser means: but truth…
4. ’88: from the comparison between events…Montaigne is contesting Aristode’s assertion that arts and sciences derive from judgements upon experiences.)
5. ’Collating objects’: Montaigne’s term image des choses is technical and based on Latin usage: imago in this sense is the comparison of form with form by some likeness between them.
6. Erasmus, Adages, I, V, X, Non tam ovum ovo simile (as we say, ‘As alike as two eggs’), citing Montaigne’s example of the ‘man at Delphi’ (or, rather, the men at Delos) who had this skill, from Cicero, Academica, II, (Lucullus) xviii, 58–9.
7. Tribonian, the ‘architect of the Pandects’ of Justinian. He ‘cut their slices’ by carving up the Roman laws into gobbets. For an attack on him in the same terms, cf. Rabelais, Tiers Livre, TLF, XLIIII, 82–94.
8. Tacitus, Annals, III, xxv.
9. The poets stressed that in the Golden Age, ‘there was no mine and thine’; and Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, I, 89 ff., stresses that no law was needed since each was guided by his innocent natural sense of right and wrong.
10. Given Montaigne’s assimilation of Indians to happy primitive tribes in the Golden Age, those nations are doubtless to be sought in the Americas.
11. Guillaume Bouchet, Serées, IX; Plato, Republic, III, 405 A.
12. Experts in the ‘art’ of law were often, even on the title-pages of their own books, referred to as ‘princes’.
13. Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXXIX, 3.
14. Quintilian, X, iii, 16 (explaining why peasants and uneducated folk speak more directly and less hesitantly).
15. Ulpian, the great second-century jurisconsult; the other two are Italian medieval glossators. Criticisms of such glossators was common in France among partisans of certain schools of legal methodology who included Guillaume Budé and Rabelais (cf. Pantagruel, TLF, IX bis, 76–100, etc.).
16. Erasmus, Adages, II, III, LXVIII.
17. [B] instead of [C]: path to it, and killed themselves. It is…
18. Not Crates but Socrates, not the proverbially obscure Heraclitus, but a certain Delius; cf. Erasmus, Adages, I, III, XXXVI, Davus sum non Oedipus, linking the saying to Heraclitus and to Diogenes Laertius, Life of Socrates, II, xxii.
19. A step in the argument from the opening quotation from Metaphysics, I, i: see the Introduction, p. xlv.
20. ’88: consists in doubt and uncertainty…
21. Cf. III, 11, ‘On the lame’, note 9. Apollo was surnamed loxias, ‘obscure’.
22. Etienne de La Boëtie, A Marguerite de Carle.
23. Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, II, vii, 12, 1108a.
24. A true statement. Geneseolutherans, Philippists (Melanchthonians), etc. formed hostile schools.
25. The example of a perfect definition, which can be used both ways: you can start from the definition and arrive at Man: start from Man and arrive at this definition: Priscian, Opera, 1527, XVII, 1180.
26. Cf. Erasmus, Adages, I, X, IX, Hydram Secas; you cut off one head of the serpent Hydra and several others grow in its place. (Well-known from Plato in the Republic, I, 427 A, where it is applied to the multiplicity of laws in an ill-governed state.)
27. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), De la vertu, 31, CD.
28. St Augustine, City of God, XXI, viii.
29. Cf. Cicero, Academica, II (Lucullus), 56.
30. ’88: some fine drawn-out, forced…
31. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Diets notables des anciens Roys, 192 B.
32. Plutarch (tr. Amyot): of. Jason, Tyrant of Thessalia; Instruction pour ceulx qui manient affaires d’estat, 173 F; Pourquoy la justice divine differe quelquefois la punition des malefices, 265 C (analogy with medicine).
33. A surprising statement. The Stoics took Nature as their standard of value. But their conception of Nature was paradoxical and, as such, attacked by Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Que les Stoïques disent des choses plus estranges que les poëtes (560C – 561A); Les contredicts des Philosophes Stoïques (561A – 574 C); Des communes conceptions contre les Stoïques (574 C – 588 F). Montaigne’s assertion may possibly be read into such objections, but one would expect him to have some definite authority behind him.
34. From Diogenes Laertius, Life of Aristippus, II, xciii and xcix; Coelius Richerius Rhodiginus, Antiquae lectiones, XIV, vi.
35. Cf. Henry Estienne, Apophthegmata, s. v. Alcibiades.
36. ’88: on a man who is not merely free from evil-doing but who acts better than others. Our justice…
37. China, increasingly known, especially from Jesuit sources, vastly widened the horizons of Renaissance moralists. Montaigne’s account doubtless derives from Juan Gonzalez, whose Historia de las cosas mas notables de la China (Rome, 1585) was rapidly translated into French by L. de la Porte (Paris, 1588).
38. Cicero contrasts justice with equity (De oratore, I, lvi, 240). It was a legal contention that, in law, equity is above all to be observed (Spiegel, Lexicon Juris Civilis, s.v. Aequitas).
39. [B] instead of [C]: no other. If anyone obeys the law because it is just, obeys it not. Our French laws…
40. That is, a study of his own self replaces a study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics.
41. Propertius, III, v, 26–30, 31; then a line interpolated from Lucan, Pharsalia, I, 417.
42. ’88: than on Plato. Were I…
43. ’88: Were it not that I see nothing but lying and that others do…
44. Virgil, Aeneid, VII, 528–30.
45. The Know Thyself of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. (Cf. III, 9, ‘On vanity’, note 160).
46. Cf. Erasmus, Adages, I, VII, XCV, Nosce teipsum (citing Plato, Charmides, 164 D); Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV, ii, 24 ff, and his portrait of Socrates in general.
47. Plato, Meno, XIV, 80.
48. Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV, ii, 29–40.
49. Cicero, Academica, I, xii, 45. (The standard reading today is adsensionem, assent, not assertionem, assertion.)
50. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), De l’amitié fraternelle, 81 F.
51. Lucan, Pharsalia, IV, 599–60; of Anthaeus, one of the giants called Sons of Earth; cf. Du Bellay, Antiquités de Rome, TLF, 12 and 11.
52. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VII, Antisthenes II and XLIV. [B] instead of [C]: through Socrates, the wisest man there ever was by the testimony of the gods and men. This application…
53. Virgil, Georgics, II, 103–4.
54. ’88: ordinary vile souls…
55. Cicero, De finibus, III, vii, 24.
56. King Perses (or Perseus, as Livy calls him) was the last king of Macedonia and was conquered by Paulus Aemilius. For his character cf. Livy, XLI, xx.
57. This bold judgement is made on the character of a king, doubtless Henry of Navarre (Henri Quatre). A rejected manuscript reading in the Bordeaux copy is: ‘I have since seen one other king to whom…’ Henry (King of Navarre, 1572–1610) became King of France in 1589. He is sure of himself enough, it is suggested, to accept frank criticism.
58. ’88: without being hurt and resentful, those who risk… Then, Plato, Gorgias, 487 A; Virgil, Aeneid, V, 415–16.
59. ’88: constantly cheated and diddled as they are. How else…
60. Cf. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, IV, Alexander Magnus, XV; LXIII, etc.
61. Martial, Epigrams, X, xlvii, 12.
62. Henry IV did indeed ask Montaigne to become such a counsellor, but too late, for Montaigne was dying.’88: middling rank. A prince is not…
63. That is Aristotle’s position on all arts at the outset of his Metaphysics. Renaissance scholars applied it particularly but not exclusively to medicine, the Art par excellence.
64. Cf. Erasmus, Apophthegmata VI, Tiberius, XIII (but referring not to ‘twenty years’ but to the age of sixty).
65. Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV, vii, 9.
66. Plato, Republic, III, 408 D–E.
67. Horace, Epodes, XVIII, 1.
68. Medicine and philosophy.
69. Seneca, Epist. moral., XC, 25 (regretting the luxury of civilized man).
70. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Propos de table, 410 B, etc. (cited several more times in the Oeuvres morales).
71. A Stoic contention.
72. ’88: were a more noble thing to borrow…Vascosan and Plantin were two great printing-houses.
73. ‘Miracles of Nature’ were unusual and most rare events but not in any theological sense miraculous: they were sources of wonder.
74. Diogenes Laertius, Life of Pyrrho, IX, lxxxi. (The contemporary nobleman next mentioned is Marquis Jean de Vivonne.)
75. Seneca, Epist. moral., LVI.
76. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, III, Socratica, LX.
77. Seneca, Epist. moral., CVIII, 17 f.
78. Erasmus, Adages, IV, IX, XXV, Usus est altera natura.
79. By using discipline for instilled habit, Montaigne may be echoing the usage of the Roman comedies, where disciplina has this sense.
80. Juvenal, Satires, VI, 576–8.
81. Plutarch, Life of Philopoemen, I.
82. [B] instead of [C]: special goblet: earthenware and silver displease me compared with glass, as does being served by hands which I am unused to or which are not in my employ, or from a common cup, and I incline to choose glasses of a particular shape. Several such foibles…
83. ’88: and so do ladies; others have tact and competence as their qualities: I, frankness and freedom. The lives…
84. Seneca, Epist. moral., XCII, 12.
85. Untraced. Then verses from Pseudo-Gallus, Elegeia, I.
86. Catullus, LXVI, 133–4; then, Horace, Odes, III, xxvi, 2.
87. Ovid, Amores, III, vii, 26 (who says nine, not six, times).
88. Known from Petronius. Cf. Tiraquellus, De legibus connubialibus, IX, 98; then, Martial, Epigrams, XI, xxii, 7–8.
89. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VII, Carneades, XXXI.
90. Quintilian, XI, iii, 40.
91. ’88: limits. We should afford them right-of-passage…
92. Paraphrased from Cicero, Tusc. disput., III, v, 12.
93. ’88: Precedent is a free and all-embracing pattern. If the medicine…
94. Seneca, Epist. moral., XCI, 15, after listing the normality of war, illness and death, and stressing that if we do not obey the laws of the world we should quit it.
95. Ovid, Tristia, III, viii, 11.
96. Plato, Republic, III, 407 C.
97. Pseudo-Gallus, Eclogues, I, 171–4; then, a development inspired by Plutarch (tr. Amyot), De la tranquillité de l’ame, 74 A–D.
98. Erasmus, Adages, I, III, XLVI, Contra stimulum calces, explaining the Classical and biblical maxim, To kick against the pricks, by Plutarch’s example of a choleric athlete named Ctesiphon, unknown except for this incident.
99. ’88: masterly countenances, threatening me…
100. Herbal laxatives and astringents.
101. Ovid, Heroidum Epistolae, V, 8.
102. Not least during the French Civil Wars of Religion, setbacks and afflictions were often seen as divinely sent punishments, proof of the Fatherly love of God correcting and purging his children with salutary chastisements. All could thus find strength and comfort in tribulation.
103. ’88: With the ladies, defending…
104. ’88: that noble sect…(Certain Stoics.)
105. Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXVIII, 6 (with a wider influence on Montaigne’s general context.)
106. ’88: for forty years […] soon be fourteen years since…
107. Plato, Phaedo, 60 B–E.
108. On legislation against excessive sleep, cf. Plato, Laws, VII, 807 E–808 D; on milder condemnation of excessive drinking, cf. ibid. II, 673 E–674 D.
109. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Qu’il est requis qu’un Prince soit sçavant, 137 A.
110. ’88: however, I can only go by horse…
111. ’88: honour and nobility of this activity…Then Plato, Republic, V, etc.
112. Virgil, Aeneid, II, 317. Then ’88: for a mind vile and base…
113. Seneca, Epist. moral., XCVI, 5 (in Seneca a metaphor, not a statement about war).
114. ’88: all my bodily senses…
115. ’88: exceeded the age at which…
116. Horace, Odes, III, ix, 19–20.
117. Ovid, Tristia, III, viii, 25.
118. Juvenal, XIII, 162. (Lack of iodine produced goitres among the Swiss.)
119. Cited by Cicero, De divinatione, I, 45, xxii from a lost work of Accius.
120. Cited together by Cicero in the same work, I, xxv, 52–3. (The work of Aristotle referred to by Cicero is lost.)
121. The example of the Atlantes was standard (cf. Rabelais, Tiers Livre, TLF, XIII, 56; Coelius Richerius Rhodiginus, XXVII, 16).
122. Cicero, De divinatione, II, lviii, 119.
123. Both cited together by Diogenes Laertius in his Life of Pyrrho.
124. Actually Favorinus criticized this view, which he reported (Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, XV, viii).
125. Seneca, Epist. moral., XVIII, 7. Then, Horace, Epistles, I, 52.
126. Seneca, Epist. moral., CXXIII, 3.
127. ’88: me.) I condemn in these disturbances of ours the cause of one of the parties, but more so when it is flourishing and successful: it [i.e. the cause] has almost reconciled me to it when I see it wretched and overwhelmed… [Pity, or sympathy, for the cause of the Reformers changes to pity for their faction.]
128. Condensed from Plutarch’s Life of Agis and Life of Cleomenes; then, Life of Flaminius and Life of Pyrrhus.
129. ’88: Those who take care of me can at little cost…
130. Herodotus, I, xxxii.
131. Cicero, De senectute, xix, 71; then, Plato, Timaeus, 81E and Cicero, De senectute, ix, 71 (again).
132. ’88: to drag her along…
133. Montaigne is rejecting proverbial Classical wisdom, which made food and wine the precursors of love-making. Cf. Erasmus, Adages, II, III, XCVII, Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus.
134. Seneca, Epist. moral., XIX, 10; then for Chilo, Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Banquet des sept Sages, 150H–151C.
135. Medical astrological almanacks (a legal monopoly of the medical profession) marked particular dates as propitious for certain foods, treatments and so on.
136. Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues confirms that vulture-skin was used in garments for warmth.
137. Erasmus, Adages, II, III, I, Aut quinque bibis aut treis, aut ne quatuor. Montaigne drinks three démi-sétiés. A septier (or sétier) was a variable measure, but for wine contained two Parisian chopines, each a little less than an English pint. Montaigne may have drunk as much as a pint and a half.
138. ’88: now, at the age of fifty-four, I have…
139. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VII, Chrysippus Solensis, VI.’88: sedate, never: and for gesticulation I am rarely to be found, on horse or on foot, without a stick in my hand. To eat ravenously…
140. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, III, Diogenes, final hundred, XXIII.
141. ’88: fine condiment at table…
142. Plato, Protagoras, 347.
143. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, XIII, 11.
144. ’88: care and pleasure of our bodies…
145. Cicero, Tusc. disput., V, vii, 20.
146. Horace, Epistles, I, ii, 54.
147. The balance of Critolaus, the peripatetic philosopher, always gave greater weight to the goods of the soul. (Cicero, Tusc. disput., V, xvii, 51.)
148. For this much reworked sentence, I have followed the punctuation of [’95] etc. The general meaning is: Being a man (that is, body-plus-soul) and being weighted towards the body, Montaigne is unable fully to enjoy pure and simple intellectual pleasures. The law of Nature which applies to our genus (animal) makes the senses the gateway of cognition and cognition the means by which the senses are appreciated. (The ideas are consonant with Epicureanism: cf. Cicero, Tusc. disput., V, xxxiii, 95–8.)
149. Cicero, De officiis, III, xxxi, 116; Academica, II (Lucullus), xlii, 131 and xxiv, 76.
150. Probably an allusion to Aristode, Nicomachaean Ethics, III, xi, 7 (1119a): men insensible to pleasure are very few and such insensibility is not human.’88: There are in our youth those who ambitiously claim to trample them underfoot: why do they…
151. ’88: theirs alone, without help from their normal pattern. Just to see, let Mars…
152. That is, let them live on war (Mars), wisdom (Pallas) or eloquence (Mercury) instead of sexual intercourse (Venus), corn (Ceres) and wine (Bacchus), the second three representing bodily ‘necessities’.’88: Bacchus. Such vaunting humours can forge themselves some contentment (for what power can our minds not have over us!) but of wisdom they have no tincture. I hate…
153. Cicero’s contention, Academica, II (Lucullus), xlv, 139.
154. Probably an echo of St Augustine, City of God, VIII, iv; but while Augustine makes Plato combine Socrates’ virtues with those of Pythagoras, he does not write of his being the mean between them. Montaigne’s term for the Mean, tempérament, represents Aristotle’s term sophrosyne.
155. ’88: pleasures which are human and bodily, I do not say…
156. From Plutarch’s Life of Brutus.
157. Horace, Odes, I, vii, 30–2.
158. ’88: and professorial wine…The quality and quantity of the drinking in the Sorbonne (the Faculty of Theology) was indeed proverbial. Cf. Sainéan, Langue de Rabelais, I, 368.
159. Cf. Rabelais, Tiers Livre, TLF, Prologue, 182; Horace, Odes, III, xxi, 9–12.
160. Cicero, De finibus, II, viii, 24 (truncated and differently applied).
161. Cornelius Nepos, Life of Epaminondas.’88: morals there ever was in man. And among…
162. ’88: of Scipio the Younger (when all is done the first man among the Romans) none is…
163. Erasmus, Adages, V, II, XX, Conchas legere, citing, apropos of Scipio and Laelius, Valerius Maximus, VIII, viii, and Cicero, De oratore, II, vi. (Montaigne introduces a confusion in [C]: he means, as he first wrote, the Younger, not the Elder, Scipio. The error remains in the posthumous editions, with the result that anecdotes about Scipio Africanus Major and Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Minor are fused into one, as are these two Scipios themselves.)
164. Livy, XIX, xix, of Scipio Africanus Major.
165. A composite picture of Socrates from the standard sources: especially Plato’s Symposium, 213A – 220D, with a borrowing from Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Socrates.
166. ’88: is to hate and disdain our being…
167. Eudoxus maintained that pleasure is the Supreme Good, arguing that all creatures, rational and irrational, seek it and avoid pain. (Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, X, ii, 1172 b.) Aristotle adds that Eudoxus had a reputation for exceptional temperance. (Cf. also ibid., I, xii.) His ‘companions’ are doubtless the Platonists, of whom he was an unorthodox associate.
168. Cicero, Tusc. disput., IV, xxxi, 66.
169. Plato, Laws, I, 632C–634B; 6360; 653A–C.
170. ’88:1 taste it and linger over it. We must…
171. ’88: I grasp it now, in its decadence; Nature…Seneca, Epist. moral., XV, 9. (Seneca presents this saying as an ‘excellent Greek proverb’ uttered by Epicurus, warning that it applies not to the lives of obviously foolish men but to our own, with its unsatisfiable desires.)
172. ’88: she –will get drunk on it but take…
173. ’88: natural health, enjoying ordinately and fully those sweet…
174. ’88:I picture to myself, from hundreds of aspects…
175. Virgil, Aeneid, X, 641–2; Lucan, Pharsalia, II, 657.
176. Seneca, Epist. moral., CXIX, 5.
177. Plutarch, (tr. Amyot), Banquet des Sept Sages, 156 G.
178. ’88: plaints are those of ingratitude. I accept wholeheartedly and thank her for it, what Nature… Giver to despise His gift, to debase it or disfigure it – Echoes of James 1:17, and of Genesis 1:25; then a conflation of phrases from Cicero, De finibus, III, vi, 20.
179. Montaigne is, textually, condemning Seneca here (Epist. moral., XCII, 7–8). Cf. also Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, III, x, 8–9; Cicero, Paradoxes, 1.
180. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, III, Socrates, LXXVI (among others); Plato, Laws, 728E; 892 AB; 896 C ff.
181. Cicero, De senectute, iii, 5 De finibus, V, xxiv, 69; III, vi, 44.’88: with bastard tracks of artifice. Is it not…
182. Cf. Erasmus, Adages, II, III, XLI, Adversum necessitatem ne dii quidem resistant, citing Simonides’ saying and, above all, Plato. Montaigne is strongly influenced by Cicero (De finibus, II, xi, 34; IV, x, 25 – IV, xi, 27–9). In I, ii, 7 Cicero notes that the three schools mentioned by Montaigne, the Academics (the Platonists), the Peripatetics (the Aristotelians) and the Stoics have the virtual monopoly of ethics. Current distortions of their principles therefore pervert virtually the whole of moral philosophy. (Cf. also, De finibus, III, vi, 20–3; ix, 25–6; Laelius, V, 19; etc.) The debt to Cicero is fundamental.
183. St Augustine, City of God, XIV, v; stressing that even Plato devalued the body in the life of Man, who is body plus soul.
184. ’88: merely. farcical commission… man’s natural fashioning […] it is simple and inborn […] seriously and expressly…Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXIV, 32 (adapted).
185. Archimedes was ecstatic when he discovered his famous principle. In the next sentence, for ‘rabble’, voirie, Montaigne substituted marmaille, a pejorative term recalling to the ear both monkey (marmot) and stew-pot (marmite).
186. ’88: privilege. Our endeavours are all worldly and among the worldly ones the most natural are the most right. Aesop…
187. From Planudes’ Life of Aesop, often printed with the Fables.
188. ’88: of human disciplines […] I can find nothing so base and so mortal… about his deification. Philotas… who exceeds the measure of a man. The noble inscription…(‘Deification’ was used by Christian mystics for the highest rapture. Montaigne replaced it, no doubt, as potentially misleading, Alexander’s ‘deification’ not being an ecstasy but an act of flattery.) For Philotas, cf. Quintus Curtius, VI, 9.
189. Horace, Odes, III, vi, 5; then the inscription greeting Pompey as he left Athens, according to Plutarch. (Cited from Amyot’s translation of his Life of Pompey the Great.)
190. ’88: common measure, without marvel, without rapture… more tenderly and more delicately. Let us commend…Horace, Odes, I, xxxi, 17–20. Apollo, son of Jupiter and Latona, was the god of healing and presided over the Muses.