Page 222
1. Horace, Epistles, I, vi, 15–16.
2. Romans 12:3, following the Vulgate Latin version in which Montaigne read his Bible. (The Greek original talks not of ‘moderation’ but of a sober estimate of one’s unimportance.) The text was inscribed in Montaigne’s library. ’88: playing with the subtlety of words; behave immoderately in; just and virtuous; The word of God… (By both ‘word’ and ‘voice’ of God Montaigne means Holy Scripture.)
3. Perhaps King Henry III.
4. Diodorus Siculus, XI, x; XII, xix.
5. Plato, Gorgias, 484C-D.
6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, IIa, IIac, 154, art. 9: the standard reference; cf. A. Tiraquellus, De legibus connubialibus, VII, 46.
7. ’80: reason, either in loving-affection or in the practices of pleasure. Those…
8. ’80: following (since there is a great danger that they may lose themselves in these excesses): even those…
9. ’80: matters strange and unlawful…
10. ’80: old; and I hold it to be certain that it is much holier to abstain. There is a people who abominate…
11. Plato, Laws, VIII, 838A ff.; Guillaume Postel, Histoire des Turcs; for Zenobia, Tiraquellus, De legibus connubialibus, IX, 88.
12. Plato, Laws, III, 390 BC, after Homer, Iiad, XIV, 294–341.
13. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Preceptes de manage, 146E. [A]: their unruly and immoderate appetites…
14. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Instruction pour ceux qui manient les affaires d’Estat, 167 H; Cicero, De officiis, I, xl, 144, distinguishing between moderation (modestia) and orderly conduct (eutaxia).
15. ’80: permitting himself loving-friendships with other women… (i.e. ’80: amitié; [C]: amour.)
16. E.g., Eusebius (Pamphilus), Ecclesiastical History, IV.
17. Propertius, III, vii, 32.
18. The Senator Junius Gallo; cf. Tacitus, Annals, VI, iii.
19. A Renaissance medical axiom. It led doctors to recommend, for example, that the cold of Montaigne’s favourite fruit, melons, be ‘cured’ by the heat of ham, pepper or ginger; but it applied to most illnesses too.
20. Related by Laonicus Chalcocondylas (tr. Blaise de Vigenère), Histoire de la décadence de l’empire grec, VII, iv.
21. All from Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Historia de Mexico, Antwerp, 1554 (tr. A. de Cravaliz as Historia del Capitano Don Fernando Cortes, Rome, 1556).