Montaigne says great authors, when they write of causes, use not only those they think true but those they believe not to be so, provided the invention has beauty. We cannot make ourselves sure of the supreme cause, so we crowd a great many together to see if one may accidentally be amongst them. He asks whence comes the custom of blessing those who sneeze. Wind from below is filthy, from the mouth carries a reproach of gluttony, but sneezing proceeds from the head and is without offence, so we give it a civil reception; they say the distinction is Aristotle's. Plutarch, who mixed art with nature and judgment with knowledge, gives fear as the reason the stomach rises at sea. Montaigne, who is very subject to it, knows by necessary experience that this cause concerns not him. The same thing happens in hogs, who are out of all apprehension of danger, and an acquaintance of his lost the disposition to vomit three or four times when very afraid in a violent storm. He was never afraid upon the water, nor in any other peril, so as to be astounded to lose his judgment. Fear springs sometimes as much from want of judgment as from want of courage. All the dangers he has been in he has looked upon without winking, with an open, sound, and entire sight; a man must have courage to fear. After the rout of the army, Alcibiades found Socrates and Lachez last among those who fled. Socrates, on foot, kept his ordinary gait, his sight firm and regular, considering and judging what passed about him, encouraging friends and signifying to enemies that he would sell his life dear. People are not willing to attack such men; they pursue those they see are in a fright. Nothing so much throws us into dangers as an inconsiderate eagerness of getting ourselves clear of them. Montaigne has no after-game: if fear once beats his soul down, he would never rise again very sound. Nature, having disarmed him of strength, has armed him with insensibility and an apprehension that is regular, or dull. He cannot long endure coach, litter, or boat, and hates all other riding but on horseback. A rough agitation upon the water he bears better than the motions of a calm; it is an interrupted motion that offends him, and most of all when most slow. Physicians have ordered him to gird the bottom of the belly with a napkin; he has not tried it, being accustomed to wrestle with his own defects.
Would his memory serve, he would set down the infinite variety of chariots in war. Very lately the Hungarians made advantageous use of them against the Turks: three thousand coaches, each with a targetter and a musketeer, poured in their shot after the cannon, then charged into the squadrons to break them. A frontier gentleman, unwieldy of body, rode such a chariot when no horse could carry his weight. Then Montaigne leaves war. The last kings of the first race travelled in a chariot drawn by four oxen. Marc Antony was the first at Rome drawn by lions, a singing wench with him. Heliogabalus had himself drawn by tigers, stags, dogs, and four naked wenches, stark naked too. Firmus used ostriches of a prodigious size, so that the chariot seemed rather to fly than roll. It is pusillanimity in monarchs, and a testimony that they do not sufficiently understand themselves, when they study to appear great by excessive expense among their own subjects. A private gentleman going finely dressed at home is superfluous; his house, attendants, and kitchen answer for him. Isocrates advises splendour in plate and furniture that devolves on successors, and avoidance of magnificences soon forgotten. Demosthenes opposes public money for the pomp of plays; Aristotle says such delights please only the baser sort and vanish as soon as the people are sated. The money would be more royally laid out in ports, havens, walls, churches, hospitals, colleges, and the reforming of streets. Fortune has interrupted the Pont-Neuf, and Montaigne is deprived of the hope of seeing it finished before he dies. Subjects watching triumphs feel their own riches exposed. Galba, pleased with a musician, gave him a handful of crowns from his own box and said this was not the public money, but his own. Yet the people, for the most part, have reason: princes feed their eyes with what they have need of to fill their bellies. Liberality is not in its true lustre in a sovereign hand. A king has nothing properly his own; he owes himself to others. Authority is not given in favour of the magistrate, but of the people. Tutors who imprint unlimited giving on young princes either regard their own profit or ill understand to whom they speak. It is too easy to inculcate liberality on him who practises it at the expense of others; they find themselves prodigal before they can be reputed liberal. Dionysius said it is the only virtue that suits tyranny itself. Montaigne would rather teach the verse of the ancient labourer: whoever will have a good crop must sow with his hand, and not pour out of the sack. Royal virtue seems most to consist in justice. An immoderate bounty checks more people than it allures.
Tyrants have been sacrificed to the hatred of the people by the very men they unjustly advanced. The more a prince exhausts himself in giving, the poorer he grows in friends; covetousness has nothing so much its own as ingratitude. Cyrus, reproached by Croesus for bounty, sent despatches to the grandees he had advanced, asking each to supply what they could. They sent more than they had received. Cyrus said he was a better husband: with a small venture he had acquired the inestimable treasure of so many friends, more faithful treasurers than mercenary men, his money better laid up than in chests. Roman emperors excused spectacles because their authority seemed to depend on the people, but when masters imitate the gifts of private citizens it is transferring money from the right owners to strangers. Philip wrote to his son, who went about by presents to gain the Macedonians: wilt thou have thy subjects look upon thee as their cash-keeper and not as their king? Then the essay lingers on Probus and the amphitheatre: a thousand ostriches and a thousand stags thrown into a planted forest; a hundred lions, a hundred leopards, three hundred bears; three hundred pair of gladiators; a floor that opened into caves of beasts, flooded for a naval battle, then strown with vermilion for a feast; a ship that disgorged four or five hundred beasts and vanished; purple curtains drawn off in a moment; nets woven of gold. If anything is excusable in such excess, it is where novelty and invention create more wonder than the expense. Montaigne is afraid our knowledge is weak in all senses; we neither see far forward nor far backward. Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, unmourned and unknown. Even if all that has arrived by report were true, it would be less than nothing in comparison of what is unknown. We make a mighty business of the invention of artillery and printing, which other men in China had a thousand years ago. There is nothing single and rare in respect of nature, but in respect of our knowledge. We vainly conclude the declension of the world from our own weakness; Lucretius vainly concluded its youth from the vigour of his time. Our world has lately discovered another, as large, well-peopled, and fruitful, and yet so raw that we are still teaching it its A B C. Montaigne is very much afraid that we have greatly precipitated its ruin by our contagion, and sold it our opinions and our arts at a very dear rate.
We have not subjected that world by the advantage of our natural worth, nor won it by justice and goodness, nor subdued it by magnanimity. Most of their answers witness that they were nothing behind us in pertinency and clearness of natural understanding. The magnificence of Cusco and Mexico, the king's garden with trees and fruits formed in gold, and the beauty of jewels, feathers, cotton, and painting, gave ample proof they were as little inferior in industry. In devotion, laws, goodness, liberality, loyalty, and plain dealing they had more, and they lost, sold, and betrayed themselves by this advantage. As to boldness against pain, hunger, and death, he would not fear to oppose their examples to the most famous on this side of the world. Take away the tricks: the sudden arrival of men with beards, mounted upon great unknown monsters, shelled in steel, with cannon enough to frighten Caesar himself, against people naked except for a little quilted cotton, surprised under colour of friendship, and you take away all the occasion of so many victories. So many thousands of men, women, and children threw themselves into inevitable dangers for their gods and liberties; some chose to die of hunger rather than accept nourishment from their so basely victorious enemies. Why did not so noble a conquest fall under Alexander or the ancient Greeks and Romans, who would have cherished the good seeds nature had produced? Instead we have taken advantage of their ignorance to incline them to treachery, luxury, avarice, and inhumanity by the pattern of our manners. So many cities levelled, so many nations exterminated, so many millions fallen by the edge of the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the traffic of pearl and pepper. Mechanic victories. Spaniards landing in a well peopled country professed they were peaceable men sent by the King of Castile, to whom the Pope had given the principality of all the Indies; they required victuals and gold, advised a change of gods, and added threats. The inhabitants answered that they did not seem peaceable; that a king who was fain to beg must be poor; that he who had made him this gift loved dissension; that gold they had in very small esteem; that they would not change their religion on a stranger's advice; and they showed the heads of executed men round the walls. The Spaniards did not stay where they found no merchandise. Atahualpa, king of Peru, paid a ransom that exceeded all belief, horses shod with massy gold, then was condemned on a false charge of insurrection, hanged and strangled after a baptism that bought off the fire, and buried under a counterfeit sorrow. Guatimosin of Mexico, having defended his beleaguered city and been promised treatment like a king, was racked with a principal lord in each other's presence when the gold fell short. The lord turned dying eyes to ask pardon that he could endure no more. The king, darting a fierce look, said only: and what dost thou think I suffer? am I in a bath? am I more at ease than thou? The lord died on the spot; the king, half roasted, was carried off because his constancy made the cruelty more shameful, and was later hanged. They burnt four hundred and sixty men alive at once and boasted of it in their own narratives. Faith, Montaigne says, does not amplify in the possession of territories, but in the gaining of men; the plunder was swallowed by the sea or by the civil wars in which they devoured one another. Mexico judged the world near its period by five successive suns. The kings of Peru built a highway from Quito to Cusco, three hundred leagues, five-and-twenty paces wide, paved, with palaces at each day's journey, and stones of ten feet square, with no art of scaffolding. Montaigne returns to coaches. Instead of these, they caused themselves to be carried upon men's shoulders. This last king of Peru, the day that he was taken, was carried betwixt two upon staves of gold, and set in a chair of gold in the middle of his army. As many of these sedan-men as were killed, so many others contended for the place, so that they could never beat him down, till a horseman, seizing upon him, brought him to the ground.
