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1. Montaigne’s term j’esguise mon courage echoes Cicero’s acuant mentem (Tusc. disput., I, xxxiii, 80), where Cicero stresses the influence of body on mind and congratulates himself (as Montaigne often does) on being slow-witted rather than a volatile, melancholy genius.

2. Julius Caesar; cf. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, IV C. Julius Caesar, V. (Caesar would rather be the first man in an alpine hamlet than second in Rome.)

3. ’88: by fortune and also by taste…

4. Cicero (De finibus, II, XX, 63–4) compares, as does Montaigne, Balbus (who despite a certain greatness, ‘knew no limit but satiety’) with Regulus and judged him a less happy example. Cicero also prefers Lucretia, who took her own life, and Lucius Verginius, a poor man who killed his virgin daughter rather than have her defiled by Appius Claudius.

5. Herodotus, III, lxxxiii.

6. George Buchanan (‘the people’s man’) the future Scottish reformer, had taught Montaigne at the Collège de Guienne in Bordeaux. His De jure regni apud Scotos appeared in 1579. This was answered by Adam Blackwood’s Apologia for Mary Stuart against Buchanan. Both works were translated into French. Jean Dorat wrote a prefatory poem for Blackwood’s book.

7. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), De la tranquillité de l’ame, 72 G.

8. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VII, Carneades, XXXII; Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Comment on peult disarner le flatteur de l’amy, 46 A–B).

9. Venus (or rather Aphrodite) in the Iliad (V).

10. Renaissance science believed that we see objects by means of rays leaving our eyes, not by rays striking the retina.

11. Perhaps a confused memory of an event related in Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VI, Varie mixta, XXVIII, when Tiberius rebuked a flattering senator.

12. Above exempla from Plutarch, Comment on pourra discerner le flatteur d’avec l’amy, 42 G, 43 A, 43 B, 45 E.

13. Both exempla from Pietro Crinito, De honesta disciplina, XII.

14. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), De la tranquillité de l’ame, 72 E; cf. De la fortune d’Alexandre, 312 E.