The Complete Essays (13 page)

[B] If I had to trouble myself further, I would find it more worthy to
imitate 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 the 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.]

Vos ne velit an me regnare hera quidve ferat fors
Virtute experiamur
.

[Let us make trial by valour, to see whether my Lady Fortune wishes you to prevail or me.]
²

In the kingdom of Ternate, among those peoples whom we complacently dub barbarous, custom requires that they never start to fight without a declaration of war, to which is added a full statement of the means they have at their disposal: what they are, how many men they have, what munitions, what arms for both attack and defence. But once having done that, if their enemies do not give in or reach an agreement they permit themselves to do their worst, believing they cannot be reproached for treachery, for cunning or for any means leading to victory.
³

The ancient Florentines were so far from wishing to get the better of their enemies by surprise attacks that a month before they sent their armies into the field they gave them warnings by continuously tolling the bell they called the
Martinella.
⁴

[A] We are less scrupulous: we hold that the honour of a war goes to him who wins by it, and following Lysander we say that when the lion’s skin does not suffice we must sew on a patch from the fox’s.
⁵
From such cunning derive the most usual opportunities for surprising the enemy: there is no hour when a commander ought to be more on his guard, we say, than during parleys and when treating for peace. That explains why it is a precept on the lips of all fighting-men of our time that no governor of a besieged fortress should ever personally go out to parley. In our fathers’ days the Seigneurs de Montmord and de l’Assigny, when defending Mousson against the Count of Nassau, were blamed for doing so.

But by this reckoning a man would be justified if he went out in such a manner that the safety and advantage remained with his own side, as happened to Guy de Rangon when the Seigneur de l’Escut drew near to parley during the siege of Reggio (if we are to believe Du Bellay, that is, for Guicciardini said it happened to himself): Rangon clung so close to his fortress that when a disturbance broke out during the parley Monsieur de L’Escut and his troops who had advanced with him found themselves to be the weaker party, with the result that not only was Alessandro Trivulzio killed there but l’Escut himself was forced to take the Count at his word and, for greater safety, to dash after him into his citadel to shelter from the violence.
⁶

[B] Eumenes was pressed by Antigonus, who was besieging him in the town of Nora, to come out and parley; after several other considerations, Antigonus asserted that since he was the greater and the stronger it was only right that Eumenes should come out to him. Eumenes made this noble answer: ‘I shall never reckon anyone to be greater than I am so long as I have the use of my sword.’ He would not agree until Antigonus, as he had requested, had handed over his nephew Ptolomy as hostage.
⁷

[A] Yet some have done very well to trust in the word of their assailant and to come out. Witness Henry de Vaux, a knight from Champagne. He was under siege by the English in Commercy castle; Barthélemy de Bonnes, who was in charge of the operations, first sapped the greater part of the fortress so that all that was needed was a match and the besieged would be buried beneath the ruins; he then summoned Henry to come out to parley – for his own advantage. He was one of four who did so. When he was made to see with his own eyes that his destruction was inevitable, he felt singularly indebted to the enemy; once he had surrendered himself and his men into their power the fuse of the mine was lighted, the wooden props began to give way and the castle was blown up from roof to basement.
⁸

[B] I readily trust others: but I would only do so with difficulty if ever I were to give grounds for thinking that I was acting out of despair or from lack of courage rather than from frankness and trust in a man’s word.