When King Pyrrhus invaded Italy he looked at the Roman army sent out to meet him and said he did not know what kind of barbarians these might be, but their order had nothing of barbarism in it. The Greeks said as much of Flaminius, and Philip of the Roman camp. Montaigne draws the caution: do not take things on trust from vulgar opinion; judge by the eye of reason, not common report. He keeps a man who lived ten or twelve years in the New World where Villegaignon landed. Plato's Atlantis and Aristotle's Carthaginian island do not match these lands, and even at home the Dordogne eats houses while the sands of Medoc bury his brother's estate. The witness is a plain ignorant fellow, more likely to tell truth because better-bred men gloss and invent so they will seem judicious. Sailors from the same voyage back him. Montaigne would have every one write what he knows, and as much as he knows, but no more. He then finds nothing barbarous in this nation except that every one gives the title of barbarism to whatever is not in use in his own country. We have no other level of truth and reason than the customs of the place wherein we live.
They are savages, he says, at the same rate we call fruits wild: nature made them, and we ought rather to call wild the natures we have changed by artifice. Art has almost smothered mother nature, yet we cannot imitate a bird's nest or a spider's web. These nations have received little form from human invention, so the laws of nature still govern them. Montaigne is sorry Lycurgus and Plato never knew them. He would tell Plato it is a nation with no traffic, no letters, no magistrate, no riches or poverty, and no words for lying or treachery. They live between sea and mountains, rarely sick, sleeping in cotton hammocks and drinking a root wine the colour of claret. An old man walks the long house before the meal and preaches two heads only: valour toward enemies and love toward wives. Prophets who fail in divination are cut into a thousand pieces if caught, and then no more heard of.
They make continual war with the inland nations, bring home an enemy's head as a trophy, and eat prisoners as a representation of extreme revenge, not as food. Having seen the Portuguese bury a man to the girdle and shoot him full of arrows, they even left their old way, thinking those newcomers greater masters in mischief. Montaigne is not sorry we notice the horror; he is sorry that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we stay blind to our own. There is more barbarity, he conceives, in eating a man alive, in racks, slow roasting, and dogs set on neighbours under colour of piety and religion, than in roasting him after he is dead. We may call these people barbarous in respect to reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them. Their wars seek only the jealousy of valour, not new land. The only ransom they ask is the confession of being overcome, and not one in an age will speak it. True honour lies in the heart and the will. He who fights on his knees is killed, not conquered.
Defeats can be more triumphant than victories: Leonidas at Thermopylae, Captain Iscolas choosing the certain loss of a pass. The honour of valour consists in fighting, not in subduing. The prisoners, kept two or three months, appear cheerful and sing that the eaters will taste their own fathers' flesh. The invention, Montaigne says, relishes nothing of the barbarian. In plain truth these men are very savage in comparison of us: they must be absolutely so, or else we are. Three of these people, not seeing how dear the knowledge of our corruptions will cost them, stood at Rouen while Charles IX was there. Asked what they most admired, they thought it strange that so many tall, armed men should submit to obey a child rather than choose one among themselves, and stranger still that men crammed with commodities could watch their hungry halves beg at the door without being taken by the throat. Montaigne talks long with one captain. His privilege is to march at the head to war. When the war ends, the villages still plane him paths through the thick of the woods. All this, he says, does not sound very ill, and the last was not at all amiss, for they wear no breeches. The interpreter is so bad that little else comes through. What the third wonder was, Montaigne has forgotten, and is troubled at it.
