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1. ’88: some appositeness and beauty…

2. Lucretius, VI, 704–5.

3. In the Problemata, XXXIII, 9, attributed to Aristotle.

4. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Causes naturelles, 536H–537A.

5. Seneca, Epist. moral., LIII, 3 (of his own experience).

6. Plato, Symposium, 221A–B.

7. Livy, XXII, v.

8. Diogenes Laertius, Life of Epicurus.

9. Nicolas Chalcocondylas, Décadence de l’empire grec, VII, vii (tr. Biaise de Vigenère).

10. Du Haillant, Hist. des Roys de France, II; then a series of examples from Pietro Crinito, De honesta disciplina, XVI, v.

11. Isocrates, Nicocles, VI, xix.

12. [C] all from Cicero, De officiis, II, xvi, 56–7. Aristotle’s judgement otherwise unknown.

13. The Queen Mother, Catherine de’ Medici.

14. Plutarch, Life of Galba.

15. Cicero, De finibus, V, vi, 16.

16. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Dicts notables des anciens Roys, 190 D–E.

17. In Amyot’s Plutarch (525 F) this verse of Corinna’s is cited in French, not Greek. The original appears in Justus Lipsius, De amphitheatro.

18. Cicero, De officiis, II, xv, 52–3; 54.

19. ’88: since clowns, pimps, fiddlers and other such riff-raff reckon that…

20. Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXIII, 2–3.

21. Xenophon, Cyropaedia, VIII, ii.

22. Cicero, De officiis, I, xiv, 43 (on the liberality of Sylla and Gaius Caesar); then, II, xv, 53–4 (on Philip of Macedonia).

23. Related after Pietro Crinito, De honesta disciplina, XII, vii, with interpolated verses from Calpurnius’ Bucolica, VII, 47; Juvenal, Satires, III, 153–5 and Calpurnius, Bucolica, VII, 64–75, taken (with much else) from Justus Lipsius’ De amphitheatro.

24. Martial, Epigrams, XII, xxix, 15–16; then, Calpurnnius, Bucolica, VII, 53–4, with other matter from Justus Lipsius.

25. ’88: forces. There is verisimilitude in saying that we neither go forward nor backwards, rolling, rather, spinning and changing. I am afraid… Then, Horace, Odes, IV, ix, 25–8.

26. Lucretius, V, 327–8.

27. Cicero, De natura deorum, I, xx, 54 (changing Cicero’s atomorum to formarum, thus linking the concept less to Lucretius than to Plato’s Great Chain of Being).

28. Many, including Rabelais, believed that printing was invented under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, so as to counteract the Devil’s invention of gunpowder and artillery (cf. Pantagruel, TLF, VIII, 92–5). Knowledge of China was being spread especially by the Jesuits.

29. Lucretius, II, 1136; then, V, 331–5.

30. The Inca garden and museum described on hearsay by Lopez de Gomara (tr. Fumée), Histoire générale des Indes, V, xiii. Much of what follows is from that work.

31. I, 31, ‘On the Cannibals’, above, pp. 79–92.

32. ’88: to beg leave to tell what he knew to redeem himself from the unbearable pain. That King…

33. Montaigne’s main source throughout is Francisco Lopez de Gomara (tr. Fumée), L’Histoire générale des Indes (1578 and 1587). It is not known whether he had also read the blistering attacks on the Conquistadores or on Spanish policy by Bishop Bartolome de las Casas, e.g. his Brevissima relación de la destruyción de Las Indias (Seville, 1552) or the account of his dispute entitled Aqui se contiene una disputa entre B. de las Casas y G. de Sepulveda (Seville, 1552), with which he would have been in agreement.

34. ’88: they preach and proclaim them. Could it be…

35. These included Pizarro, condemned to death in 1548.

36. Montaigne’s term plus civilisez probably means not ‘more civilized’, but ‘more urban and hence more given to civic virtues’ than the pastoral Indians; similarly his term plus artistes probably means ‘more cultured’ rather than ‘more artistic’: they had more developed arts and sciences.

37. Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Histoire générale des Indes, II, lxxv and (for the Royal road described later) V, lxxxvii.

38. According to the teaching of Alkindi, Albumasar and other Islamic astrologers widely accepted in medieval and Renaissance Europe, when a ‘great conjunction’ (that of the planets Saturn and Jupiter) occurs in the first degree of the zodiacal sign of the Ram, it produces one single outstanding prophet, teacher or lawgiver. Such a great conjunction was calculated to occur every 960 years. Both Islamic and Christian astrologers often held that a great conjunction heralded the birth of Moses, Jesus and Mahomet. Cf., for example, Petrus de Abano, Conciliator (Diff. XVIII). The great conjunction mentioned by Montaigne was the one preceding the birth of the Prophet of Islam. The theory of the influence of conjunctions was, of course, challenged by many.

39. Attabalipa.