When Fear Makes Us Cruel — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne opens with a lived thesis: cowardice is the mother of cruelty, and the fiercest often carry feminine weakness. Alexander, tyrant of Pheres, wept at tragic heroines on stage yet murdered citizens daily without pity; meanness of spirit, not strength, drives extremes. Valour delights only in resistance and stops at mercy; pusillanimity, having missed the first danger, claims the massacre afterward, like wolves on the dying. Victory's worst butchery is done by camp rascals who dare not face the field.

Our fathers kept revenge graduated; we begin at killing. Montaigne argues that subduing an enemy outranks slaughtering him, and that revenge wants the offender alive to feel it. A pistol through the head saves the victim from repentance and the killer from reputation; killing frustrates future injury more than it satisfies past wrong, and is more fear for yourself than bravery. Pollio waited to libel Plancus until he was dead, biting his thumb at a blind man; Aristotle invited whips if he were not there to feel them.

Cowardice also bred seconds and thirds in duels, witnesses who must fight lest they look cold. Montaigne's brother, serving as second in Rome, ran in after dispatching his man because the principals still stood; the king had to ransom him. Three Frenchmen in Libya cannot live a month without fighting; gentlemen learn fencing abroad and die before they learn it. Emperor Maurice, told Phocas was timorous, concluded he would be cruel; tyrants exterminate because faint hearts trust only extinction, and Philip ordered murdered men's children despatched daily.

Theoxena, fleeing Philip, armed her nephews with swords and poison rather than surrender them alive, then followed them into the sea with her husband. Tyrants invent lingering deaths yet simple execution exceeds what fear can deter; Josephus saw crucified men live days, Mohammed cut men at the diaphragm, and all beyond a simple death looks absolute cruelty. Montaigne closes on Croesus carding a man like wool, Epirot lords flayed alive for fifteen days, and George Sechel, whose captors made his brother drink his blood before boiling the rest, cruelty feeding cruelty to the end.