I’m going to skip some of the short ones in this segment, such as Of riding post (pp. 626-7) and Of thumbs (pp. 634-5), on the grounds that I couldn’t come up with anything funny to write about them. If anything, they bolster the Montaigne-as-blogger argument, because we all have observations that don’t really go anywhere: “But they made sense at the time!”
This week’s main reading was Of evil means employed to a good end (pp. 627-630). Like Socrates does in the Republic, Montaigne draws out the correspondence between man and state:
The diseases and conditions of our bodies are seen also in states and government: kingdoms and republics are born, flourish, and wither with age, as we do. We are subject to a useless and harmful surfeir of humors. . . . States are often seen to be sick of a similar repletion, and it has been customary to use various sorts of purgation.
And so, just as the medicine of his day called for leeching or bloodletting for personal health, the health of the state also relied on such practices. In this case, though, establishing colonies and fighting wars serves to drain humors:
Sometimes also [the Romans] deliberately fostered wars with certain of their enemies, not only to keep their men in condition, for fear that idleness, mother of corruption, might bring them some worse mischief . . . but also to serve as a bloodletting for their republic and to cool off a bit the too vehement heat of their young men, to prune and clear the branches of that too lustily proliferating stock.
The choice, as M. puts it after citing several examples through history, is between foreign war and civil war, and the former is the “milder evil.”
He goes on to declare that gladiator fights were more humane than, um, the ancients’ practice of human vivisection of condemned criminals (?), because at least the latter was meant for the health of the soul while the latter only aided treatment of the body (?). M. does get around to condemning gladiatorial combat for getting out of hand —
The early Romans used criminals for such examples; but later they used innocent slaves, and even freeman who sold themselves for this purpose; finally Roman senators and knights, and even women.
— but he points out that this practice isn’t so bizarre, given the fact that, as he was writing, foreign mercenaries were fighting France’s internal quarrels merely for money.
* * *
Of the greatness of Rome (pp. 630-2): The Romans could make slaves out of kings, and kings out of ordinary citizens.
* * *
Not to counterfeit being sick (pp. 632-634): Don’t make a face or it’ll freeze like that.
, by Richard Price.
