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 toget 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
[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 toget 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
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