44

44. On sleep

[Classical philosophy tends to see the Sage as a man untouched by emotion. Montaigne, preoccupied as often by war, treats of sleep in the context of exempla relating to great men in wartime.]

[A] Reason ordains that we should keep to the same road but not to the same rate; and although the wise man must never allow his human passions to make him stray from the right path, he may without prejudice to his duty certainly quicken or lessen his speed, though never plant himself down like some fixed and impassive Colossus. If Virtue herself were incarnate I believe that even her pulse would beat faster when attacking the foe than when attacking a dinner – indeed it is necessary that she should be moved and inflamed. That is why I have noted as something quite rare the sight of great persons who remain so utterly unmoved when engaged in high enterprises and in affairs of some moment that they do not even cut short their sleep.1

On the day appointed for his desperate battle against Darius, Alexander the Great slept so soundly and so late that when the hour of battle was pressing close, Parmenion was obliged to enter his chamber and call out his name two or three times to wake him up.2

The very same night that the Emperor Otho had resolved to end his life, he put his private affairs in order, distributed his money between his followers, sharpened the edge of the sword he intended to use for his blow and then, waiting only to know that each one of his friends had withdrawn to safety, fell so soundly asleep that his servants of the bedchamber heard him snoring.

The death of that Emperor has much in common with the death of the great Cato, and especially that feature; for when Cato was ready to take his own life, he was waiting for news to be brought that the Senators he had sent away had sailed out of the port of Utica when he fell into so deep a sleep that his breathing could be heard in the neighbouring room; and when the man he had sent to the port woke him to tell him of the storm which had prevented the Senators from sailing away in safety, he dispatched another and, settling down in his bed, he went off to sleep again until the man came back and told him that they had left.

And we can again compare him to Alexander, when during the Cataline Conspiracy there was such a storm over the treachery of Metellus the tribune who was determined to publish the decree summoning Pompey and his army back to Rome. Cato alone opposed that decree and he and Metellus had exchanged gross insults and great threats in the Senate; but the decision had to be carried out the following morning in the public Forum. Metellus was to come there, favoured by the plebs as well as by Caesar who was then allied to Pompey’s interests: he was to be accompanied by a crowd of foreign mercenaries and gladiators who would fight to the last; Cato was to come supported by nothing but his own constancy. His family and friends and many others were deeply anxious about this: some of them spent the night together with no desire to sleep, drink or eat because of the danger they saw awaiting him; his wife and his sisters especially did nothing but fill his home with weeping and wailing; he on the contrary reassured everyone there; having dined as usual, he went to lie down and slept a deep sleep until morning, when one of his fellow tribunes came to wake him up to enter the affray. What we know of the courage of [C] this man from the rest of his life3 [A] enables us to judge with absolute certainty that what he did proceeded from a soul high high above such events, which he did not deign to take to heart more than any ordinary occurrence.

In that sea-fight which Augustus won against Sextus Pompeius off Sicily, he was just about to go into battle when he was overcome by so sound a sleep that his friends had to come and wake him up to get him to give the signal for the engagement. That provided Mark Antony later on with an excuse for accusing him of not having the will even to look straight in the eye of the troops he had drawn up for battle and of not daring to face his soldiers before Agrippa came to tell him the news of his own victory over his enemies.

But to turn to young Marius, he did worse: for on the day of his last encounter with Sylla, he drew up his army, gave the signal for battle, then went to lie down for a rest in the shade of a tree where he fell so fast asleep that he could scarcely be awakened by the rout of his fleeing soldiers, having seen nothing of the combat; they say it was from being so exhausted by fatigue and want of sleep that nature could stand no more.

While on this topic it is for the doctors to decide whether sleep is such a necessity that our very life depends on it: for we are certainly told that King Perseus of Macedonia, when a prisoner in Rome, was done to death by being prevented from sleeping.

[C] Herodotus mentions nations where men sleep and wake a half-year at a time. And the biographer of Epimenides the Wise says that he slept for fifty-seven years in a row.4