When Leaders Chase the Wrong Glory — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne sets Cicero and the younger Pliny beside each other as men of a beyond measure ambitious nature. Both solicit the historians of their time not to forget them in their memoirs, and fortune has kept those vain requests alive while the histories themselves have gone to oblivion. They even published private letters to friends, some never sent, rather than lose their labours. Two consuls of Rome spent leisure contriving quaint missives to seem versed in their own mother tongues, work a pitiful schoolmaster could have done no worse. Xenophon and Caesar wrote because their acts far transcended their eloquence. They meant to recommend their doing, not their speaking.

It is mockery, Montaigne says, to extol a man for qualities that do not belong to his condition, even when those qualities are otherwise commendable. Praise a king as a painter, an architect, or a runner at the ring, and you add no honour unless justice and the science of governing come first. Demosthenes, hearing companions praise Philip of Macedon as handsome, eloquent, and a stout drinker, said those were commendations more proper for a woman, an advocate, or a sponge than for a king. Plutarch adds that excellence in less necessary qualities witnesses that a man has spent his time ill. Philip, hearing Alexander sing at a feast to the wonder of the best musicians, asked if he was not ashamed to sing so well. Iphicrates answered an orator who pressed him on whether he was a man at arms, an archer, or a pikeman: he was none of these, but he knew how to command all of them.

When anyone dwells on the language of his essays, Montaigne would rather they said nothing, because to elevate the style is to depress the sense. Two other philosophers promise eternity to the letters they write, yet those letters instruct a man not to speak but to do well. Cicero's nature shows more plainly when Eros, a slave, brings word that an oration is deferred a day, and Cicero is so ravished with joy that he frees the man for the news. Montaigne himself writes letters post-haste, with blots and no margin, and says the letters of his age consist more in fine edges and prefaces than in matter. The real business is already dispatched. The long harangues, offers, and titles still wait to be added at the bottom.