[B] Quisquam
Vix radicitus e vita se tollit, et ejicit:
Sed facit esse sui quiddam super inscius ipse,
Nec removet satis aprojecto corpore sese, et
Vindicat.
[A man does not tear himself from life by the roots and cast himself away: unawares, he dreams that some part of himself will still remain; he does not withdraw enough from that cast-off body nor free himself.]10
[A] Bertrand Du Guesclin died at the siege of Rancon castle near Le Puy in Auvergne. When the besieged later surrendered they were made to bring out the keys of the fortress borne on the body of that dead man. When Bartolomeo d’Alviano, the general of the Venetian army, had died in the service of their wars in. Brescia, his corpse had to be brought back to Venice through the territory of their enemy, Verona; the majority in the army were in favour of asking the Veronese for a safe-conduct but Teodoro Trivulcio opposed it, choosing to pass through their lands by force of arms at the hazard of battle. ‘It is not becoming,’ he said, ‘that he who never feared his enemy while alive should show fear of them when dead.’11
[B] In a kindred matter, by the laws of the Greeks anyone who asked leave of the enemy to retrieve a corpse for burial had definitely given up any claim to victory; it was not licit to erect a trophy. For him to whom the request was made it was proof that he had won. That is how Nicias lost the advantage he so clearly had over the Corinthians, and how on the other hand Agesilaus rendered certain the doubtful advantage he had acquired over the Boeotians.12
[A] These details might seem odd, were it not acceptable in all ages to project beyond this life the care we have for ourselves, and to believe moreover that divine favours often accompany us to the tomb and extend to our remains. There are so many ancient examples of this, let alone our own, that there is no need for me to dilate on them. Edward I, King of England, in the long wars with Robert, King of Scotland, had assayed how great an advantage his presence conferred on his affairs since he always won the victory when personally present at an engagement; when he was dying he bound his son by a solemn oath to boil his body as soon as he was dead, so as to separate his flesh from his bones and bury it; as for his bones, he was to keep them, carrying them with him in his army whenever he should happen to be fighting against the Scots – as though it were fated by Destiny that victory should reside in his joints.
[B] John Vischa, who brought insurrection to Bohemia in defence of the errors of Wyclif, wished to be flayed after death and his skin to be made into a drum to bear in battle against his foes; he reckoned that that would prolong the superiority which he had known in the wars he had waged against them. Similarly certain Indians bore into battle against the Spaniards the bones of one of their leaders, out of respect for the good fortune which he had known in life. And other tribes in that same World bear in their war-train the bodies of their valiant men who had died in battle, to provide both good fortune and encouragement.13 [A] My first examples were of men seeking to preserve in the tomb reputations acquired by previous acts: the later ones intended to convey that they still could act; but the deed of Captain Bayard constitutes a better compact: realizing he was fatally wounded in the body by a volley of harquebuses, he replied when advised to withdraw from the fray that he would not now at the end of his life start to turn his back on the enemy; having fought as long as he had strength, feeling himself faint and sliding from his saddle, he commanded his batman to lay him at the foot of a tree, but in such a fashion that he should die facing the foe. As he did.14
I must add this further example, which is as worthy of note in this connection as any of the foregoing. The Emperor Maximilian, the great-grandfather of the present King Philip, was a monarch fully endowed with great advantages; among others, he was singularly handsome. One of his humours was flat contrary to that of princes who, to get through important business, make a throne of their lavatory: he never allowed a valet such intimacy as to see him on his privy. He would even hide away to pass water, being as scrupulous as a [C] maiden [A] about uncovering, for a doctor or anyone else, those parts which are customarily kept hidden.15 [B] I myself, so shameless in speech, have nevertheless in my complexion a touch of such modesty: except when strongly moved by necessity or pleasure I rarely let anyone’s eyes see those members or those actions which our customs ordain to be hidden. I find this all the more constraining in that I do not think it becoming in a man, above all in one of my calling.16 But Maximilian became [A] so scrupulous that he expressly commanded in his will that linen drawers should be tied on him when he was dead. He should have added a codicil saying that the man who pulled them on ought to be blindfold!
[C] The order which Cyrus gave to his children (that neither they nor any others should see or touch his body once his soul had left it) I attribute to some personal vow; for among their other great qualities both he and his historian sowed broadcast through their lives a singular care and reverence for religion.17
[B] I was not pleased by a tale which a great prince told me about a member of a family allied to mine, a man well-known in peace and war: when very old, and dying within his court extremely tormented by the stone, he consumed all his last hours with vehement cares about the dignity and pomp of his funeral: he summoned all the nobility who visited him to promise to join his cortège. He urgently begged this very prince, who saw him in his last moments, to command that his family be present, employing many examples and arguments to prove that it was appropriate to a man of his station; and having extracted that promise and established to his liking the arrangements and order of his procession, he seemed to die happy.
I have rarely known vanity so persistent.
That opposite care (and my family does not lack an example of that either) seems to me to be cousin-german to the other: it consists in getting worried and worked up at this final stage about restricting the attendance (out of some private and unwonted frugality) to one servant and one lantern. I have seen this humour praised, as was the command of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who forbade his heirs to perform for him the ceremonies which were customary in such matters.18 Is it still temperance and frugality if we avoid expenditures the use of which – and pleasures all knowledge of which – we are incapable of perceiving? An easy way to reform; and it costs little!
[C] If it were necessary to make arrangements for it, my decision would be that in this as in all other of life’s actions each man should conform his principles to the size of his fortune; Lycon, the philosopher, wisely prescribed that his friends should lay his body where they thought best, and, as far as the funeral was concerned, should make it neither excessive nor niggardly.19 [B] I shall leave it [C] purely to custom to order this ceremony; I shall entrust myself to the discretion of the first people this duty shall fall to.20‘Totus hic locus est contemnendus in nobis, non negligendus in nostris.’ [All this is a matter to be despised for ourselves but not neglected for our own.] And a saint put it a saintly way: ‘Curatio funeris, conditio sepulturae, pompa exsequiarum magis sunt vivorum solatia quam subsidia mortuorum.’ [The arranging of funerals, the choosing of tombs and the pomp of obsequies are consolations for the living rather than supports for the dead.] That is why Socrates (when Crito asked him in his final moments how he wanted to be buried) replied, ‘Just as you wish.’
[B] If I had to trouble myself further, I would find it more worthy toimitate those who set about enjoying the disposition and honour of their tombs while they are still alive and breathing, and who take pleasure in seeing their dead faces carved in marble. Happy are they who can please and delight their senses with things insensate – and who can live off their death.
[C] I can almost enter into an implacable hatred against all democratic rule (even though it seems to me to be the most natural and the most equitable) when I think of the inhuman injustice of the people of Athens, who sentenced to death, without remission, without even listening to their defence, those brave commanders who had just won that naval engagement against the Spartans off t
he Argunisae Islands; it was the most closely contested battle and the greatest that the Greek forces had ever fought at sea; but after that victory, rather than staying to gather up their dead and bury them, they had exploited the opportunities offered them by the laws of war. Diomedon’s action made their execution even more odious: he was one of the condemned, a man of notable virtue in both war and politics; after hearing the judgement condemning them, he advanced to speak, only then obtaining a quiet hearing; instead of exploiting this for the good of his cause and for revealing the manifest injustice of so cruel a verdict, he showed only concern for the protection of his judges: he prayed the gods to turn this judgement to their advantage; and, lest failure to carry out the vows which he and his companions had made in gratitude for such glorious good fortune should draw down the wrath of the gods upon them, he then told them what those vows had been. Then, without another word and without bargaining, he strode courageously to his execution.
A few years later Fortune punished the Athenians by giving them sops from their own bread: for Chabrias the captain-general of their navy had got the upper hand over Pollis the Spartan admiral off the island of Naxos, but he lost the fruit of the victory clean outright – though it was of great consequence to them – out of fear induced by this exemplary punishment. Rather than lose a few dead bodies of his friends floating in the water, he allowed to sail away in safety a vast array of living enemies, who made them pay dearly later on for so grievous a superstition.21
Quaeris quojaceas post obitum loco?
Quo non nata jacent.
[You ask where you will lie after death?
Why, where the unborn lie.]22
On the other hand the following poet endows a body bereft of its soul with the ability to feel at rest:
Neque sepulchrum quo recipiat, habeat portum corporis,
Ubi, remissa humana vita, corpus requiescat a malis.
[May it have no tomb to welcome it, no harbour where, having surrendered human life, the body may find a rest from evils.]23
4. How the soul discharges its emotions against false objects when lacking real ones
[As often in the Essays, ‘soul’ here includes all aspects of the human personality not strictly corporeal. Montaigne is especially concerned in this chapter with those irrational bursts of choler which are vented in wrath directed against inanimate or guiltless objects and which sweep over great generals every bit as much as over a girl distraught with grief for her brother or over a gouty old man. Our mind (our esprit) is ever like that: prone to be irrational as well as refractory to right rule.]
[A] A local gentleman of ours who is marvellously subject to gout would answer his doctors quite amusingly when asked to give up salted meats entirely. He would say that he liked to have something to blame when tortured by the onslaughts of that illness: the more he yelled out curses against the saveloy or the tongue or the ham, the more relief he felt. Seriously though, when our arm is raised to strike it pains us if the blow lands nowhere and merely beats the air; similarly, if a prospect is to be made pleasing it must not be dissipated and scattered over an airy void but have some object at a reasonable distance to sustain it:
[B] Ventus ut amittit vires, nisi robore densæ
Occurant silvæ spatio diffusus inani;
[As winds, unless they come up against dense woods, lose their force and are distended into empty space;]1
[A] it seems that the soul too, in the same way, loses itself in itself when shaken and disturbed unless it is given something to grasp on to; and so we must always provide it with an object to butt up against and to act upon. Plutarch says of those who dote over pet monkeys or little dogs that the faculty for loving which is in all of us, rather than remaining useless forges a false and frivolous object for want of a legitimate one.2 And we can see that our souls deceive themselves in their emotions by erecting some false fantastical object rather than let there be nothing to act upon. [B] Animals are likewise carried away by anger: they attack the stone or piece of iron which has wounded them or else take vengeance on the pain they feel by biting themselves:
Pannonis haud aliter post ictum saevior ursa
Cum jaculum parva Lybis amentavit habena,
Se rotat in vulnus, telumque irata receptum
Impetit, et secum fugientem circuit hastam.
[Not otherwise does the bear in Pannonia: made more savage by the blow struck by the Libyan hunter with his dart tied to a leather thong, she rolls on her wound and attacks the weapon buried in her flesh and chases it round and round in circles as it flees from her.]3
[A] What causes do we not discover for the ills which befall us! What will we not attack, rightly or wrongly, rather than go without something to skirmish against? It is not those blond maiden tresses which you are tearing, nor the whiteness of that bosom which you are beating so cruelly in your distress, which killed your beloved brother with an unlucky musket-ball. [C] When the Roman army in Spain lost those two great commanders who were brothers, Pliny says ‘flere omnes repente et offensare capita’. [at once, they all start weeping and beating their heads.]4 A common practice. And was it not amusing of Bion the philosopher to ask of that king who was tearing out his hair in grief: ‘Does he think that alopecia gives relief from sorrow?’5 [A] And who has not seen a man sink his teeth into playing-cards and swallow the lot or else stuff a set of dice down his throat so as to have something to avenge himself on for the loss of his money! Xerxes flogged the waters [C] of the Hellespont, put them in shackles and heaped insults upon them [A] and wrote out a challenge defying Mount Athos; Cyrus kept an entire army occupied for several days in taking revenge on the river Gyndus for the fright it gave him when he was crossing it; and Caligula demolished a very beautiful house on account of the pleasure his mother had taken in it.6
[C] In my younger days the country-folk used to tell how one of our neighbours’ kings who had received a good cudgelling from God swore to get his revenge on him by ordering that, for ten years, nobody should pray to Him, mention Him nor (insofar as it lay in his power) even believe in Him. By this they meant to portray not so much the folly as the inborn arrogance of the nation about which this story was told.7 Those vices always go together but, in truth, such actions are more beholden to overweening pride than to stupidity.
[A] When Caesar Augustus had been battered by a storm, he began to defy Neptune, the god of the sea; to get his revenge during the ceremonies at the games in the Roman Circus he removed his statue from its place among the others. In that, he was less excusable than the generals mentioned above – and less than he himself was later on when, having lost in Germany a battle under Quintilius Varus, he kept beating his head against the wall in anger and despair, crying, ‘Varus! Give me back my soldiers!’ Those other cases surpass all folly since they add blasphemy to it when they address [C] themselves thus [A] to God – or even to Fortune as though she had ears subject to our assaults – [C] following the example of the Thracians who revenge themselves like a Titan during thunder and lightning by shooting darts into the sky, seeking to bring God to his senses by a shower of arrows.8
[A] Yet as that old poet says in Plutarch:
Point ne se faut courroucer aux affaires:
II ne leur chaut de toutes nos choleres
[There is no point in getting angry against events: they are indifferent to our wrath.]9
[B] But we shall never utter enough abuse against the unruliness of our minds.
5. Whether the governor of a besieged fortress should go out and parley
[This chapter, arising from Montaigne’s reflections on his reading of Renaissance French and Italian historians in the light of his own experience of war, belongs to those chapters which he wrote near the beginning of his enterprise, when the Essays appear to have been intended mainly as a gentleman’s thoughts on matters military and political.]
[A] In the war against Perseus, king of Macedonia, the Roman legate Lucius Marcius, wishing to gain the time he still needed to get his army
ready, sowed hints of agreement by which the king was lulled into granting a truce for several days, thus furnishing his enemy with the opportunity and freedom to arm himself; because of this the king met his final downfall. Nevertheless [C] the old men in the Senate, mindful of the morals of their forefathers, condemned this action as being opposed to their practices [C] in ancient times which were, they said, to fight with valour not with trickery, surprise attacks or night encounters; nor did they use pretended flight or unexpected charges; they never made war before it was declared and seldom before announcing the time and place of the battle. From the same conscientious scruple they sent that treacherous doctor back to Pyrrhus and that wicked schoolmaster back to the Phalisci. Those were truly Roman ways of acting – not Grecian guile or Punic cunning, for which it is less glorious to win by might than by deceit. There may be a momentary advantage in deception, but only those men acknowledge that they are beaten who know that it was neither by ruse nor mischance but by valour, soldier against soldier in a legitimate and just war. It is clear from what those good men decided that they had not yet accepted [A] that fine saying:
dolus an virtus quis in hoste requirat?
[Trickery or valour: what does it matter between enemies?]1
[C] According to Polybius, the Achaeans detested all kinds of ruses in their wars, only holding it to be a victory when the hearts of their enemies were beaten low. Another writer said: ‘Eam vir sanctus et sapiens sciet veram esse victoriam, quæ salva fide et integra aignitate parabitur.’ [A man who is pious and wise will know that a real victory is won only when integrity is safeguarded and greatness kept intact.]
The Complete Essays Page 9