The Complete Essays
Page 156
13. The reference to Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio (not Scipio Africanus) is from Seneca, Epist. moral., XXIV, 9. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, V; Epaminondas, XXIII. For Montaigne, Epaminondas was the greatest of virtuous soldiers and a model to be followed.
14. Etienne de La Boëtie.
15. ’88: in a quiet and assured manner… (i.e., seurement corrected to sourdement)
1. Cicero, Tusc. disput., I, xxx, 74–xxxi, 75. In Plato (Phaedo 67D) for Socrates, whom Cicero is following, to philosophize is to practise dying. However, Cicero translates ‘practice’ not by meditatio, which means that, but by commentatio, which means a careful preparation. Montaigne is here echoing Cicero, not Socrates directly, and so lessens the element of ecstasy implied by Socrates.
2. ’80: as the Holy Word says…
Montaigne is at best paraphrasing not citing Scripture: cf. Ecclesiastes 3:12; 5:17; 9:7; also Ecclesiasticus 14:14 (no New Testament text is relevant). Several inscriptions in Montaigne’s library prove that he was citing either or both of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus from some untraced intermediary source.
3. ’80: for us our torment. Now there are no means of reaching this point, of fashioning a solid contentment, unless it frees us from the fear of death. [A] That is why…
4. Seneca, Epist. moral., CXVII, 30.
5. On Cicero’s authority (Tusc. disput., II, xviii, 43), virtus, the Latin word for virtue, was normally derived from vir (man) not from vis (strength). True virtue, in this sense, was ‘manliness’. (Same etymology: Essays, II, 7.)
6. Philosophical pleasure (quite ascetic in Epicurus) is contrasted here with sexual pleasure.
7. In the great myth of Hesiod, the father of Greek mythology (Works and Days, 289), the upward path to Virtue is steep and rugged: once attained, her dwelling-place is a delightful plateau. (Cf. Rabelais, Quart Livre, LVII, Joachim Du Bellay, Regrets, TLF, 3. 3.) Montaigne is rare in challenging the truth of the myth: most accepted it, often with a Christian sense.
8. ’80: That is why all Schools of Philosophy meet and concur in this one clause, teaching us to despise it [i.e., death]. It is true…
9. The last resort of the Stoic: suicide. (Xenophilus’ longevity was proverbial.)
10. Horace, Odes, II, iii, 25.
11. Cicero, De finibus, I, xviii, 60; Erasmus, Adages, II, IX, VII, Tantali lapis (a boulder was ever about to fall on Tantalus’ head but never did, keeping him in suspense for all eternity).
12. [A] until [C]: past all fair mansions of France, and ply them… (Horace, Odes, I, xviii; Claudian, In Ruffinum, II, 137.)
13. Contrast III, 12, in which Montaigne denies that death is the end to which our life aims (its ‘but’) but merely its ending (‘bout’).
14. Lucretius, IV, 472.
15. Montaigne believed that feu (‘the late’) derived from fut (‘he was’). That is a false etymology. But the Romans could indeed say vixit (‘he has lived’) to mean, ‘he is dead’ or ‘he has died’.
[B]: They were happy with living…
16. Traditionally the year began at Easter (or thereabouts). Dating the year from the first of January, a Roman practice, was decreed in France in 1565 and generally applied in 1567.
17. ’80: another year more to go…
18. Christ incarnate was God and Man, immortal as touching his Godhead, mortal as touching his Manhood. (Thirty-three is a traditional age of Christ at the Crucifixion.)
19. Horace, Odes, II, xiii, 13–14.
20. Lists like these were common in Renaissance compilations and handbooks. Montaigne is partly following here Ravisius Textor’s Officina (‘Workshop’). The lecherous Pope was Clement V (early fourteenth century); the French king killed in a tournament (1559) was Henry II; his ancestor killed by a pig was Philip, the crowned son, who never reigned, of Louis the Fat.
21. Two exempla from Pliny, VII, liii.
22. Horace, Epistles, II, ii, 126–8.
23. Horace, Epistles, III, ii, 14–17; Propertius, IV, xviii, 25.
24. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Banquet des Sept Sages, 1515A.
25. Horace, Epistles, I, iv, 13–14. Then echoes of Seneca’s Epist. moral., I, lxxxviii, 25, and of Plutarch’s Life of Paulus Aemilius.
26. Catullus, LXVIII, 26. On Montaigne’s melancholic humour, which was modified by the sanguine, cf. II, 17. (His comportment corresponds to the symptoms associated with melancholy.)
27. ’80: fever and death, with his head…
28. Lucretius, III, 195.
29. Seneca, Epist. moral., XCI, 16.
30. Horace, Odes, II, xvi, 17.
31. Lucretius, III, 898–9 (Lambin); Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 88.
32. [A] until [C]: for action: and I am of the opinion that not only an Emperor, as Vespasian said, but any gallant man should die on his feet: Cum moriar… Then Ovid, Amores, II, x, 36.
33. Lucretius, III, 900.
34. By ‘churches’ here Montaigne means pagan temples. Then, Silius Italicus, The Punic War, XI, li.
35. Herodotus, II, lxxviii; Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VI; varie mixta, LXXXIV.
36. Cicero, De officiis, II, V, 16. Dicearchus’ book was called The Perishing of Human Life. It has not survived.
37. ’80: than that. I realize from experience that Nature…
38. Caesar, Gallic Wars, VII, lxxxiv.
39. Pseudo-Gallus, Elegies, I, 16. (Like his contemporaries Montaigne attributed to Cornelius Gallus poems later attributed to Maximianus.)
40. Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXVII, 19. The Emperor was Gaius Caesar (Caligula), not Julius Caesar.
41. Horace, Odes, III, iii, 3–6.
42. Horace, Epistles, I, xvi, 76–9.
43. St Augustine, City of God, I, xi.
44. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, III; Socratica, LII.
45. Cicero, Tusc. disput., I, xxxix, 94.
46. The main source of what follows is Nature’s soliloquy in Lucretius, III.
47. Lucretius, II, 76 and 79; cf. Erasmus, Adages, I, II, XXXVIII, Cursu lampada tradunt.
48. Seneca (the dramatist), Hercules furens, III, 874; Manilius, Astronomica, IV, xvi.
49. Lucretius, III, 938; 941–2.
50. Seneca, Epist. moral., XCIX, 12.
51. Manilius cited by Vives (Commentary on St Augustine’s City of God, XI, iv).
52. ’80: Its role is done…
53. Lucretius, III, 1080; Virgil, Georgics, II, 402; Lucretius, III, 944–5.
54. Seneca, Epist. moral., XXX, 11.
55. Lucretius, III, 1090 (within a wider Lucretian context); III, 885 (adapted); III, 919; 922; 926.
56. Seneca, Epist. moral., LXIX, 6; then Lucretius, III, 972–3.
57. Several echoes of Seneca: Epist. moral., LXXVII, 20, 13 (etc.); XLIX; LXI, LXXVII. Then, Lucretius, III, 968.
58. ’80: same hour that you die…
Further borrowings, Seneca, Epist. moral., LXXVII.
59. Lucretius, II, 578–80.
60. Nature is still speaking and the inspiration is still Senecan; cf. Epist. moral., XCIII, 2 ff.
61. Cf. Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead, XXVI; Ovid, Metamorphoses, II, 649 ff.
62. Diogenes Laertius, Life of Thales, XXX.
63. Seneca, Epist. moral., CVII, and CXX. The entire speech of Nature, who adds her arguments to Reason’s in support of ‘our religion’s contempt for life’ is a patchwork of quotation, at first from Lucretius and subsequently from Seneca.
64. Seneca, Epist. moral., XXIV, 14.
65. [A] until [C]: Blessed, and thrice blessed, the death… (Doubtless an echo of Aeneas’ evocation in Virgil, Aeneid, I, 94.)
1. Medieval philosophical axiom. Cf. the scholastic dictionary of Erasmus Sarcerius.
2. ’80: Everyone is struck by it, but some are transformed…
3. [’95] adds that this event took place in Toulouse. The following exemplum concerns Gallus Vibius, an orator; his case is recorded by Marcus Annaeus Seneca (the rhetorician): Controversiae, 9, and was well-known from such compendia as Ravisius
Textor’s Officina (s.v. maniaci et furiosi) and Coelius Richerius Rhodiginus’ Antiquae Lectiones, VI, 35.
4. Lucretius, IV, 1035–6.
5. Pliny, XI, xlv.
6. Current examples drawn from Lucian, the Goddess of Syria, I; Pliny, VII, iv; then, for Iphis, the Cretan girl who became a youth, Ovid, Metamorphoses, IX, 793 ff – For Antiochus, until [C], Antigonus (wrongly). Pontanus is Johannes Jovinianus Pontanus, a Renaissance scholar and philosopher.
7. Episode related in Montaigne’s Journal de Voyage for September 1580.
8. Robert Burton later cites these examples, which Henry Cornelius Agrippa ‘supposeth to have happened by force of imagination’ (Anatomy of Melancholy, Part I, Sect. 2, Memb. 3, Subsection 2)
9. H. C. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, I, lxiv.
10. St Augustine, City of God, XIV, xxiv. The priest was called Restitutus. These exempla are in Coelius Richerius Rhodiginus, Antiquae Lectiones, XX, xvi.
11. Some scholars, as well as popular superstition, attributed such impotence to diabolical magic.
12. [A], replaced by [C]: A body from elsewhere. For the man who has time to compose himself and to recover from this trouble, my advice is that he should divert his mind to other thoughts (if he can, for it is difficult) and that he should escape from such ardour and tension of imagination. I know of some who have found it useful to bring to the job a body which they had quietened and tamed elsewhere. And in the case of the man who is frightened of an attack of magic impotence, you should extricate him by persuading him that you can furnish him with counter-enchantments of miraculous and certain effect. But it is also requisite that the women whom one may legitimately approach should drop these ritual and affected manners of severity and refusal, and that they should constrain themselves a little to conform to the exigencies of our wretched century. For the heart of an attacker…
13. Such magico-medical medallions were favoured by Ficino and other Renaissance Platonists. Jacques Peletier, the mathematician, is mentioned again in ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’. Among his Latin treatises on mathematics is one On the meeting of lines (1579) and one on the mystical meanings of numbers (1560).
14. Herodotus, II, clxxxi.
15. Cf. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Preceptes de mariage, VIII.
16. [A] (instead of [C]): arise, and this fearfulness increases and redoubles on all subsequent occasions: and without some counter-mine you cannot easily get the better of it. One man, perhaps…
17. St Augustine, City of God, XIV, xxiv, incorporating the comments of Vives.
18. ’95: death. And would to God that I knew only from the history books how often our stomach, by the refusing of one single fart, may bring us to the very gates of a most excruciating death. And if only that Emperor who gave us liberty to fart in any place had also given us the power to do so! Yet against…
The Emperor who intended to make this decree was Claudius.
19. Since the ‘consort’ (the female organ) has no erections.
’95: For the action of the aforesaid is sometimes to invite inopportunely but never to refuse, inviting moreover wordlessly and quietly. By which…
20. Love (Eros, Cupid) is a daemon in Plato’s Symposium.
21. Until the eighteenth century the Kings of France (and of England) were credited with the power to cure scrofula (the ‘King’s evil’).
22. Apparently the doctor cited by Pedro Mexia in his Silva de varia lecion, II, vii.
23. This theme is taken up again in ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’.
24. Ovid, De remedio amoris, 615–16.
25. Pliny, VII, ii, and IX, x.
26. Virgil, Eclogue, III, 103.
27. Standard exempla given by Coelius Richerius Rhodiginus, Antiquae lectiones (XX, xv) explaining the power over the body of the rational soul and of the faculty of imagination. For Jacob’s ewes which produced variegated lambs, cf. Genesis, 30:36–9 and St Augustine, City of God, XII, xxv.
28. Until [C]: human occurrences…
1. Seneca, De bene ficiis, VI, xxxviii.
2. Philemon the Younger, cited in John Stobaeus, Apophthegmata (with Latin version by Varinus Favorinus). He wrote many comedies, all of which are lost.
3. Lucretius, II, 753; III, 519.
1. Erasmus, Adages, I, II, LI, Taurum tollet, qui vitulum sustulerit (stressing importance of childhood habits). Cf. also IV, IX, XXV, Usus est altera natura.
2. Pliny, XXVI, ii.
3. For Plato (Republic, VII) all mankind are like men born and bred in a cave, who are convinced that shadows on the wall projected by spiritual realities outside theircave are those realities themselves. Only the inspired philosopher can hope to enlighten them.
4. Mithridates. This, and the reference to Albertus Magnus, from Pedro Mexia, Varia lecion, I, xxvi.
5. From Francisco Lopez de Gomara (tr. Fumée), Hist, générale des Indes (Paris, 1578).
6. Cicero, Tusc. disput., II, xvii, 40.
7. Those dwelling near the cataracts grow used to the noise and therefore cannot hear it: so too mankind cannot hear the music of the spheres. (Cicero, Dream of Scipio, XI, xix.)
8. Recorded by Diogenes Laertius, Life of Plato, III, xxxviii.
9. ’80: so fantastical – and…
10. Standard Christian doctrine: true belief requires prevenient grace, which cannot be merited.
11. Cicero, De natura deorum, I, xxx, 83.
12. All from Francisco Lopez de Gomara (tr. Fumée), Hist, générale des Indes, as is all of [B] after the following [C]
13. The borrowings from Gomara end here: there follows a borrowing from Herodotus and a series of borrowings from Simon Goulart’s Histoire du Portugal.
14. ’88: that opinion, so unnatural, that souls…
(Belief in the immortality of the soul was thought to be virtually universal.)
15. Details follow, from Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, etc.
16. The Amazons, described, for example, by the historian Justinus, II, iv.
17. ’80: Where not only the horror of death is despised but the hour of its coming even to the dearest persons one has is rejoiced in with great merriment; and as for pain, we know others where seven-year-old boys…
18. In Sparta. A much cited and admired example of self-sacrifice.
19. In Persia (Xenophon, Cyropaedia, I, ii, 11).
20. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Des Vertueux faits des femmes, and Herodotus, II, xii.
21. Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, VII, vi, 1149 b; then follows a direct allusion to VII, v, 1148 b, on morbid desires arising from ethos.
22. [’95] over-mastery as such. It is by means of custom that each is pleased with the place in which Nature has planted him: the savages of Scotland have no time for Touraine, nor the Scythians for Thessalia. Darius…
23. After Herodotus, III, xii.
24. Lucretius, II, 1023–5 (Lambin).
25. [A], until [C]: so wretched and weak…
26. Plato, Laws, VIII, vi.
27. Diogenes Laertius, Life of Chrysippus.
28. [A] until [C]: wished similarly to assay himself and to loose…
29. The French, many of whose laws were in Latin or medieval French.
30. Isocrates, Ad Nicoclem, VI, xviii (a treatise on government).
31. According to Paulus Aemilius this Gascony gentleman’s name was, simply, ‘Gascon’.
32. France. (Such criticisms were long current. In Molière’s Le Misanthrope Alceste will appear laughable for objecting to such practices.)
33. The Stoic attitude: cf. Rabelais, Tiers Livre, TLF, VII and, in the following century, Molière in Le Misanthrope.
34. This was the golden political rule of Etienne de la Boëtie (cf. the end of I, 28, ‘On affectionate relationships’). The following verse is from a fragment of Greek tragedy.
35. Zaleucus; known from Diodorus Siculus, XII, iv.
36. Lycurgus the lawgiver of Sparta. Cf. Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus.
37. [A] until [C]: that old rust
y sword…
Cf. Valerius Maximus, II, vi-7. Massilia (now Marseilles) was a Greek colony.
38. ’88: which has beset us, for the last twenty-five or thirty years is not solely responsible…
(The ‘novelty’ was the Reformation and the Wars of Religion.)
39. Ovid, Heroïdes (Epistle of Phyllis to Demophon, 48).
40. ’88: The first who shake…
41. Source not identified.
42. In Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Comment on peut discerner le flatteur d’avec l’amy, 44 E.
43. Terence, Andria, I, i, 114.
44. Livy, XXXIV, Iiv.
’88: the best of alleged reasons for novelty… (titre replaced by praetexte)
45. Livy, X, vi.
46. Herodotus, VIII, xxxvi.
47. Cf. Titus 3:1; Romans 13:1–7.
48. Christ in his apparent ‘foolishness’ is the ‘Wisdom of the Father’ (I Corinthians 1:30); his trial and crucifixion took place according to State law. Christians are the ‘elect’ (those chosen by God for salvation) and often find salvation through martyrdom. Christianity is spread by accepting injustice not by rebellion against the State. These are standard Catholic arguments, accepted by many from their reading of Erasmus.