When Words Become Weapons of Deception — The Essays of Montaigne

A rhetorician of times past said that to make little things appear great was his profession. Montaigne calls him a shoemaker who can make a great shoe for a little foot, and says Sparta would have whipped such a fellow for a tricky and deceitful act. King Archidamus asks Thucydides which wrestler is better, Pericles or he; Thucydides answers that when he has thrown Pericles, Pericles still persuades the spectators he had no fall and carries away the prize. Women who paint their ruins deceive only the sight; rhetoricians make it their business to corrupt judgment itself. Lacedaemon and Crete, republics that kept a regular government, held orators in no great esteem. Aristo called rhetoric a science to persuade the people; Socrates and Plato called it an art to flatter and deceive. The Mohammedans will not have their children taught it. The Athenians, seeing the harm, stripped away the exordiums and perorations that move the affections. Eloquence is an engine for a tumultuous rabble, used like physic to the sick. In Athens, Rhodes, and Rome it helped Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, and the rest climb higher than arms could. Volumnius, backing Fabius and Decius for the consulship, said those men were born for war and wanting in the combat of the tongue; the eloquent were only good to make praetors of.

Eloquence most flourished at Rome when public affairs were in the worst condition, as a free and untilled soil bears the worst weeds. A monarchy has less need of it: one person is harder to lead by the ears than a crowd, and good education can secure him from the poison. No famous orator came out of Persia or Macedon. Montaigne enters the discourse because of an Italian he has taken into his service, late clerk of the kitchen to Cardinal Caraffa. Asked for an account of his office, the man discourses of palate-science with magisterial gravity, as if handling a point of divinity: appetites before the meal and after the second and third service, how to satisfy the first and raise the other two, sauces, salads hot and cold, garnishment for the eye, and the order of the whole service. He uses the same lofty words men use when they discourse of the government of an empire. The lecture brings Terence's cook to mind, inspecting dishes as if they were a mirror. The Greeks admired the order Paulus AEmilius kept at a feast, but Montaigne says he speaks here of words only, not of effects.

When architects thunder out pilasters, architraves, cornices, and the Corinthian and Doric orders, his imagination is possessed with the palace of Apollidon, and after all he finds only the paltry pieces of his own kitchen door. Grammar words, metonomies, metaphors, and allegories, sound exotic and come near the babble of his chambermaid. Another gullery of the same stamp is to call the offices of the kingdom by the lofty titles of the Romans, though they have no similitude of function and still less of authority. Worse, the world now confers the most glorious surnames antiquity reserved for one or two persons in several ages. Plato carried away the surname of Divine by universal consent; the Italians have lately bestowed the same title upon Aretin, in whose writings Montaigne sees tumid phrases and far-fetched periods, and nothing above the ordinary writers of his time. And we make nothing of giving the surname of great to princes who have nothing more than ordinary in them.