Winter brings on cold weather; and we must shiver. Summer returns, with its heat; and we must sweat. Unseasonable weather upsets the health; and we must fall ill. In certain places we may meet with wild beasts, or with men who are more destructive than any beasts … And we cannot change this order of things … it is to this law [of Nature] that our souls must adjust themselves, this they should follow, this they should obey … That which you cannot reform, it is best to endure.
Seneca began his book on nature as soon as he had first offered Nero his resignation. He was granted three years. Then in April 65, Piso’s plot against the emperor was uncovered, and a centurion dispatched to the philosopher’s villa. He was ready. Topless Paulina and her maids might have collapsed into tears –
– but Seneca had learned to follow the cart obediently, and slit his veins without protest. As he had reminded Marcia on the loss of her son Metilius:
What need is there to weep over parts of life?
The whole of it calls for tears.
(Ill. 14.3)
IV
Consolation for Inadequacy
1
After centuries of neglect, at times hostility, after being scattered and burnt and surviving only in partial forms in the vaults and libraries of monasteries, the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome returned triumphantly to favour in the sixteenth century. Among the intellectual élites of Europe, a consensus emerged that the finest thinking the world had yet known had occurred in the minds of a handful of geniuses in the city states of Greece and the Italian peninsula between the construction of the Parthenon and the sack of Rome – and that there was no greater imperative for the educated than to familiarize themselves with the richness of these works. Major new editions were prepared of, among others, Plato, Lucretius, Seneca, Aristotle, Catullus, Longinus and Cicero, and selections from the classics – Erasmus’s Apophthegmata and Adages, Stobeus’s Sententiae, Antonio de Guevara’s Golden Epistles and Petrus Crinitus’s Honorable Learning – spread into libraries across Europe.
In south-western France, on the summit of a wooded hill 30 miles east of Bordeaux, sat a handsome castle made of yellow stone with dark-red roofs.
(Ill. 15.4)
It was home to a middle-aged nobleman, his wife Françoise, his daughter Léonor, their staff and their animals (chickens, goats, dogs and horses). Michel de Montaigne’s grandfather had bought the property in 1477 from the proceeds of the family salt-fish business, his father had added some wings and extended the land under cultivation, and the son had been looking after it since the age of thirty-five, though he had little interest in household management and knew almost nothing about farming (‘I can scarcely tell my cabbages from my lettuces’).
He preferred to pass his time in a circular library on the third floor of a tower at one corner of the castle: ‘I spend most days of my life there, and most hours of each day.’
(Ill. 15.5)
The library had three windows (with what Montaigne described as ‘splendid and unhampered views’), a desk, a chair and, arranged on five tiers of shelves in a semicircle, about a thousand volumes of philosophy, history, poetry and religion. It was here that Montaigne read Socrates’ (‘the wisest man that ever was’) steadfast address to the impatient jurors of Athens in a Latin edition of Plato translated by Marsilio Ficino; here that he read Epicurus’s vision of happiness in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, edited by Denys Lambin in 1563; and here that he read and re-read Seneca (an author ‘strikingly suited to my humour’) in a new set of his works printed in Basle in 1557.
He had been initiated in the classics at an early age. He had been taught Latin as a first language. By seven or eight, he had read Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Before he was sixteen, he had bought a set of Virgil and knew intimately the Aeneid, as well as Terence, Plautus and the Commentaries of Caesar. And such was his devotion to books that, after working as a counsellor in the Parlement of Bordeaux for thirteen years, he retired with the idea of devoting himself entirely to them. Reading was the solace of his life:
It consoles me in my retreat; it relieves me of the weight of distressing idleness and, at any time, can rid me of boring company. It blunts the stabs of pain whenever pain is not too overpowering and extreme. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply need to have recourse to books.
But the library shelves, with their implication of an unbounded admiration for the life of the mind, did not tell the full story. One had to look more closely around the library, stand in the middle of the room and tilt one’s head to the ceiling: in the mid-1570s Montaigne had a set of fifty-seven short inscriptions culled from the Bible and the classics painted across the wooden beams, and these suggested some profound reservations about the benefits of having a mind:
(Ill. 15.6)
The happiest life is to be without thought. – Sophocles
Have you seen a man who thinks he is wise? You have more to hope for from a madman than from him. – Proverbs
There is nothing certain but uncertainty, nothing more miserable and more proud than man. – Pliny
Everything is too complicated for men to be able to understand. – Ecclesiastes
Ancient philosophers had believed that our powers of reason could afford us a happiness and greatness denied to other creatures. Reason allowed us to control our passions and to correct the false notions prompted by our instincts. Reason tempered the wild demands of our bodies and led us to a balanced relationship with our appetites for food and sex. Reason was a sophisticated, almost divine, tool offering us mastery over the world and ourselves.
In the Tusculan Disputations, of which there was a copy in the round library, Cicero had heaped praise upon the benefits of intellectual work:
There is no occupation so sweet as scholarship; scholarship is the means of making known to us, while still in this world, the infinity of matter, the immense grandeur of Nature, the heavens, the lands and the seas. Scholarship has taught us piety, moderation, greatness of heart; it snatches our souls from darkness and shows them all things, the high and the low, the first, the last and everything in between; scholarship furnishes us with the means of living well and happily; it teaches us how to spend our lives without discontent and without vexation.
Though he owned a thousand books and had benefited from a fine classical education, this laudation so infuriated Montaigne, it ran so contrary to the spirit of the library beams, that he expressed his indignation with uncharacteristic ferocity:
Man is a wretched creature … just listen to him bragging … Is this fellow describing the properties of almighty and everlasting God! In practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives than [Cicero].
The Roman philosopher had overlooked how violently unhappy most scholars were; he had arrogantly disregarded the appalling troubles for which human beings, alone among all other creatures, had been singled out – troubles which might in dark moments leave us regretting that we had not been born ants or tortoises.