SOURCE: MacPhail, Eric. “Montaigne and the Praise of Sparta.” Rhetorica 20, no. 2 (spring 2002): 193-211.

[In this essay, MacPhail examines Montaigne's writings on Sparta, maintaining that he used the comparison between ancient and modern cultures as a way of defining the values of his own time.]

In the Apophthegmata regum et imperatorum, Plutarch recounts the anecdote of the sophist who proposed to give a speech in praise of Hercules. “Who blames him?” asked the Spartan king Antalcidas.¹ This anecdote appealed sufficiently to Plutarch for him to repeat the same saying twice in the Apophthegmata Laconica, where it is attributed first to Antalicidas and then to Brasidas. The premise of this laconic logic is that we only praise what others blame. Praise and blame are two sides to the same story, counter concepts that cannot exist independently of each other. In light of this tradition of the “Herculis encomium” or superfluous praise, we might ask why Montaigne repeatedly and lavishly praises the Spartans, generally for the same type of verbal austerity displayed by Antalcidas. Who blames Sparta? To what speech are the Essais a counter speech or antilogos?²

The answer can be sought first in the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond” (II,12) where Montaigne blames what others praise, the faculty of reason. Here, embedded in this vast indictment of reason, is an exemplary praise of Sparta. Drawing on a range of Renaissance compendia, Montaigne argues for the advantages of ignorance on the authority of St.Paul, the Roman emperors Licinius and Valentinian, Mohammed, and Lycurgus the Spartan lawgiver: “mais l'exemple de ce grand Lycurgus, et son authorité doit certes avoir grand pois; et la reverence de cette divine police Lacedemonienne, si grande, si admirable et si long temps fleurissante en vertu et en bon heur, sans aucune institution ny exercice de lettres” (p. 497).³ So innocent are the Spartans of all learning and instruction that they recall the New World natives who “sans magistrat et sans loy, vivent plus legitimement et plus regléement que les nostres” (p. 497). The sources from which these examples are drawn, including Henricus Cornelius Agrippa's De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium and Ortensio Lando's Paradossi, suggest the paradoxical dimension of Montaigne's laconism or admiration for ancient Sparta. On the previous page of the “Apologie,” Montaigne drew several examples of the advantage of ignorance from Erasmus's adage “In nihil sapiendo jucundissima vita” (Adages 1981). In such a context, the praise of Sparta appears as a declamatory theme, like the praise of folly or the praise of savages, a subgenre which Montaigne helped to popularize with his essay “Des Cannibales.”

As a specimen of paradoxical encomium, the praise of Spartan simplicity is an exercise in rhetoric and an illustration of the flexibility of language, which can speak on both sides of an issue. The relativism of language was formulated most acutely in the ancient world by the sophist Protagoras, to whom Diogenes Laertius attributes the saying that there are two sides or duo logoi to every question, opposed to each other (Lives of the Philosophers 9.51).⁴ Montaigne would have known this phrase in the Renaissance Latin translation of Ambrogio Traversari, “primusque dixit duas omnium rerum esse rationes invicem contrarias,” which may have inspired the opening line of the essay “Que nostre desir s'accroit par la malaisance” (II,15): “Il n'y a raison qui n'en aye une contraire, dict le plus sage party des philosophes” (p. 612). Pierre Villey identifies the wisest party of philosophers with the skeptics and recalls Sextus Empiricus' definition of the principle of skepticism as the opposition to every logos of an equal and contrary logos.⁵ Henri Estienne rendered this principle in his Latin translation of 1562 as “omni orationi orationem aequalis ponderis et momenti adversari.” Montaigne also encountered Protagoras's doctrine in Seneca's Moral Epistles, letter 88, where Protagoras is assimilated to a wide range of Pyrrhonists and other epistemological nihilists: “Protagoras ait de omni re in utramque partem disputari posse ex aequo et de hac ipsa, an omnis res in utramque partem disputabilis sit” (Epistulae morales 88.43). This is the version which Montaigne repeats in the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond” in a C-addition: “Protagoras dict qu'il n'y a rien en nature que le doubte; que, de toutes choses, on peut esgalement disputer, et de cela mesme, si on peut esgalement disputer de toutes choses” (p. 526). Whereas Seneca condemned Protagoras's doctrine of the duo logoi, Montaigne endorses it as a challenge to dogmatism and a foundation of skepticism. In this way, when conceived of as a counter discourse or ratio contraria, the praise of Sparta contributes to the skeptical design of the Essais.

The praise of Sparta is all the more paradoxical since Sparta is a locus of anti-rhetoric. Spartan simplicity manifests itself most conspicuously in the laconic style of speech, which is impatient of rhetoric. Plutarch's Lives and Moralia are full of examples of Spartan hostility to rhetoric, many of which Montaigne repeats in his essays, although curiously enough he does not cite the archetypal example of Antalcidas and the sophist. Spartan indifference to sophistic rhetoric was notorious ever since Plato's dialogue Hippias major (282D-283B), to which Montaigne alludes in the essay “Du pedantisme” (I,25,p. 143). Perhaps Montaigne's epideictic rhetoric responds to the challenge of how to praise the antagonists of encomium.

Yet, when abstracted from the context of the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond,” the praise of Sparta is not inherently a declamatory theme. Though in many respects unusual among ancient city states, Sparta is not trivial or reprehensible like the quartan fever, or baldness, or the fly, or the parasite or any of the other unlikely objects of praise which Erasmus lists in the prefatory epistle of the Praise of Folly.⁶ On the contrary, Sparta was often idealized in antiquity and the Renaissance, and Montaigne's Essais inscribe themselves in a long and venerable tradition of laconism.⁷ If anything, the praise of Sparta is overdetermined in Montaigne's work by numerous social, political, ethical and esthetic motives. Sparta appeals to Montaigne for its militarism, its conservatism, its anti-intellectualism, and its exemplary antagonism to Athens, the classical model of civic humanism. If Montaigne accentuates the paradoxical dimension of his theme, he does so in order to challenge the predominant values of humanist culture. Perhaps most of all, he praises Sparta so as to conserve his independence from doxa or received opinion.

If we recall our paraphrase of Antalcidas, “who blames Sparta?”, the only answer we can find, the only formal literary attack, is a work by Polycrates of Athens of which there remain no fragments and only a single testimony, from Flavius Josephus's Contra Apionem (bk. 1, ch. 24).⁸ A contemporary of Plato, Polycrates was a fairly prominent sophist, best known for his accusation of Socrates and his paradoxical encomium of the tyrant Busiris. Some have inferred from this résumé that his Psogos Lakedaimonion or blame of Sparta was also a paradox.⁹ Others stress the political motivation of a professional rhetor and committed democrat who wrote against Sparta in order to reaffirm the values of Athenian civilization.¹⁰ Polycrates's antilaconism reminds us of the interconnection of political, rhetorical and philosophical issues in the Spartan tradition. The same issues and their interconnection reappear in Montaigne's Essais in a new context of civil war and social transformation.

The widest context in which Montaigne sets the praise of Sparta involves the relationship between rhetoric and politics explored in the essay “De la vanité des paroles” (I,51). Here Montaigne rehearses a traditional litany of charges against rhetoric, many of them taken from Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria (2.15-16), while omitting Quintilian's refutation of the same charges. One of the characteristics of this essay is its predilection for laconic definitions, as seen in the opening sentences: “Un Rhetoricien du temps passé disoit que son mestier estoit, de choses petites les faire paroistre et trouver grandes. C'est un cordonnier qui sait faire de grands souliers à un petit pied. On luy eut faict donner le fouet en Sparte, de faire profession d'un' art piperesse et mensongere” (p. 305). The first sentence has its antecedents in Erasmus's Apophthegmata and more distantly in Plutarch's Moralia and Plato's Phaedrus while the second comes directly from Plutarch's Apophthegmata Laconica (208C) rendered in French by Jacques Amyot.¹¹ The third phrase commemorates Spartan hostility to rhetoric. Since at least the time of Plutarch, apothegms had been closely associated with Sparta, and Erasmus foregrounds this association in his adage “Laconismus” (Adages 1949), according to which Spartan brevity was proverbial for either of two reasons: “sive quod Lacedaemonii factis magis quam eloquentia praecelluerunt sive quod in apophthegmatis praecipue valuerunt.”¹² The apothegm embodies the Spartan prejudice that brevity betokens probity as Erasmus explains in reference to an anecdote taken from Plutarch's Apophthegmata Laconica (232B): “Huc spectabat Charillus, qui roganti, quur Lycurgus tam paucas leges prodidisset, ‘Quoniam’, inquit, ‘pauciloquis non est opus multis legibus’, notans obiter Athenienses, quorum loquacitati nullae leges sufficiebant.” Whereas the Greek text merely reports Charillus's saying, Erasmus elicits the moral of the story: “Sunt autem haec inter se cognata, pauca loqui et probum esse virum.” If Montaigne cultivates the uniquely Spartan genre of apophthegmata, his purpose may be to claim the probity that is cognate with brevity.

“De la vanité des paroles” first addresses the political dimension of rhetoric by signaling the absence of orators in Sparta: “Les republiques qui se sont maintenuës en un estat reglé et bien policé, comme la Cretense ou Lacedemonienne, elles n'ont pas faict grand compte d'orateurs” (p. 305). This phrase reveals the Platonic cast of Montaigne's laconism, since Plato's Laws and other dialogues consistently pair Crete and Sparta as well regulated states immune to Athenian disorder. However, a more immediate inspiration for this pairing is the speech by Curiatius Maternus at the end of Tacitus' Dialogue of the Orators, from which Montaigne borrows several arguments and images concerning the political implications of rhetoric.¹³ In Tacitus's dialogue, Marcus Aper defends modern, post-Ciceronian rhetoric while Vipstanus Messala deplores the decadence of modern rhetoric before Maternus dismisses rhetoric completely as inimical to the political stability of imperial Rome. To illustrate the superfluousness of oratory in a well ordered republic, he alleges the examples of Crete and Sparta: “Quem enim oratorem Lacedaemonium, quem Cretensem accepimus? quarum civitatum severissima disciplina et severissimae leges traduntur” (Dialogus 40.3). Alain Michel has pointed out that Tacitus here reacts against a passage from the Brutus where Cicero deplores the same anti-rhetorical bias of which Maternus seems to approve.¹⁴ Tracing the origins of the art of rhetoric, Cicero remarks on Athenian preeminence among the Greeks: “Hoc autem studium non erat commune Graeciae, sed proprium Athenarum. Quis enim aut Argivum oratorem aut Corinthium aut Thebanum scit fuisse temporibus illis?” (Brutus 13.49-50). In Cicero's estimation, Sparta is particularly conspicuous for its dearth of rhetorical talent: “Lacedaemonium vero usque ad hoc tempus audivi fuisse neminem.” Above all, Cicero cannot admit the praise of Spartan brevity: “Brevitas autem laus est interdum in aliqua parte dicendi, in universa eloquentia laudem non habet.” Thus when Montaigne echoes Tacitus, he endorses the anti-Ciceronian strain of Renaissance esthetics. The Essais are only too happy to grant the laus which Cicero denies to Sparta.

Montaigne follows Maternus' argument that rhetoric flourishes in times of political upheaval and social dissension. He even adopts the same image that Tacitus uses to evoke the role of rhetoric in the Roman republic before the establishment of the principate. “L'eloquence a fleury le plus à Rome, lors que les affaires ont esté en plus mauvais estat, et que l'orage des guerres civiles les agitoit: comme un champ libre et indompté porte les herbes plus gaillardes” (p. 306). This simile, as others have noted, recalls Tacitus' phrase: “Nostra quoque civitas, donec erravit … tulit sine dubio valentiorem eloquentiam, sicut indomitus ager habet quasdam herbas laetiores” (Dialogus 40.4).¹⁵ If civil war is a fertile field for eloquence, then Montaigne and his contemporaries ought to be excellent orators, but he insists that eloquence is out of place in a monarchy. In fact he infers as much from the affinity of civil war and eloquence, remarking immediately after his paraphrase of Tacitus: “Il semble par là que les polices qui dépendent d'un monarque, en ont moins de besoin que les autres” (p. 306). However, Montaigne's conclusion does not follow so easily from his premise. Since France “depends” on a monarch, it ought to have no use for rhetoric, but rhetoric flourishes during civil war, which is perfectly compatible with monarchy, as illustrated both by French and Roman history. It is not clear what analogy Montaigne wishes to draw between France and Rome, and indeed his essay dramatizes the problem of historical analogy. Can France revive Roman imperium or only Roman anarchy; and what bearing does ancient Sparta have on the modern world?

Montaigne exacerbates this problem in the conclusion to his essay where he identifies anachronism as one of the worst abuses of rhetoric: “C'est une piperie voisine à cettecy, d'appeller les offices de nostre estat par les titres superbes des Romains, encores qu'ils n'ayent aucune ressemblance de charge, et encores moins d'authorité et de puissance” (p. 307). To name a modern office, such as a parliamentary charge, by an ancient title, such as senator, is a rhetorical trick and a violation of historical decorum, because political institutions have changed and the present cannot measure up to the past. Perhaps, by insisting on the disproportion of past and present, Montaigne would like to dismiss rhetoric as an anachronism unsuited to his own time, yet he also fears rhetoric as a menacing presence in a society beset by civil war. Clearly, the essay “De la vanité des paroles” is unable to resolve the tensions it raises between anachronism and exemplarity, or between rhetoric and royalty, and these tensions infiltrate Montaigne's praise of Sparta. Ancient Sparta evicted orators and avoided civil war, and for that it earns a praise which is both fraught with anachronism and ambivalent toward its own rhetorical status.

From “De la vanité des paroles,” therefore, it appears that the praise of Sparta is associated, in Montaigne's thoughts and in his rhetorical strategy, with the dispraise of rhetoric and the preference for monarchy over less stable forms of political organization.¹⁶ As an antagonist of rhetoric, Sparta can also serve as a patron for aristocratic disdain of humanist rhetorical culture and as a figure for a socially inflected style of life and art. This is the role that Sparta assumes most explicitly in Montaigne's essays on pedagogy, “Du pedantisme” (I,25) and “De l'institution des enfans” (I,26). In the first of these consecutive essays, Montaigne asks the somewhat disingenuous question of why humanist pedagogues or “pedantes” have such a low reputation, a reputation which he seeks to confirm by every argument and example at his disposal. To disparage the modern pedants, who are incapable of public service, he contrasts them with the ancient philosophers, who were equally gifted for action and for contemplation (p. 135). Humanist education is impractical, he feels, because it does not teach us to appropriate our lessons, only to repeat them. What interests Montaigne is the issue of legitimate ownership both in intellectual and social terms. The humanist disciple is only the guardian of knowledge, not the owner: “Nous prenons en garde les opinions et le sçavoir d'autruy, et puis c'est tout. Il les faut faire nostres” (p. 137). By a series of antitheses, Montaigne seeks to expose the deficiencies of humanist pedagogy: the humanists prefer theory to practice, memory to understanding, remembrance to judgment, and knowledge to sense (pp. 139-40). As a consequence, the student remains alienated from his lesson; he fails to take possession of what remains merely a commonplace, unassimilated to his own identity. The remedy lies in the pedagogy of antiquity and especially in the educational practice of the Spartans and Persians.

It is probably the figure of Xenophon, notorious laconist and author of the Cyropaedia, who suggested to Montaigne the pairing of Persia and Sparta and who serves moreover as a model parent by his decision to have his own children educated in Sparta rather than in his native city of Athens (p. 143 from Apophthegmata Laconica 212B). What these two conspicuously authoritarian societies share, besides a rather treacherous alliance during the Peloponnesian War, is a system of education based on what might be called the case study of ethics. Montaigne summarizes their method as follows: “La façon de leur discipline, c'estoit leur faire des questions sur le jugement des hommes et de leurs actions; et, s'ils condamnoient et loüoient ou ce personnage ou ce faict, il falloit raisonner leur dire, et par ce moyen ils aiguisoient ensemble leur entendement et apprenoient le droit” (p. 142). In a neat reversal of the antitheses that characterize humanist pedagogy, the lacono-Persian method emphasizes judgment over memory, and action over speech. Spartans learn not by words but by deeds, and as a result their lesson becomes innate rather than acquired:

ils ont voulu d'arrivée mettre leurs enfans au propre des effects, et les instruire, non par ouïr dire, mais par l'essay de l'action, en les formant et moulant vifvement, non seulement de preceptes et parolles, mais principalement d'exemples et d'oeuvres, afin que ce ne fut pas une science en leur ame, mais sa complexion et habitude; que ce ne fut pas un acquest, mais une naturelle possession.

(p. 142-43)

Montaigne's language here reveals the social bias of his argument. Spartan virtue is not a purchase but an inheritance, “pas un acquest, mais une naturelle possession.” In ethical terms the Spartans are a feudal nobility opposed to the commoners and parvenus who frequent the humanist colleges of Renaissance France.

Montaigne develops the same metaphor in the following essay when discussing the ethics of literary imitation. Any author who imitates another should conceal his borrowings, Montaigne avers, just as a parliamentary magistrate conceals his source of income: “Vous ne voyez pas les espices d'un homme de parlement, vous voyez les alliances qu'il a gaignées et honneurs à ses enfants. Nul ne met en compte publique sa recette: chacun y met son acquest” (p. 152). The magistrate in parliament conceals his “recette,” his bourgeois commercial fortune, and reveals his “acquest,” the title of nobility which his office confers on him. However, the Spartans go him one better since their virtue is not an acquisition but a natural possession. In effect, Sparta represents the sort of absolute social legitimacy to which Montaigne seems so desperately to aspire. For all his noble posturing, he is never completely at ease with his own title, which remains for him an “acquest” rather than a “naturelle possession.”¹⁷

In this context we can recall an interesting anachronism from Jacques Amyot's version of Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus, a text which furnished Montaigne with numerous examples of Spartan “prud'hommie.” Plutarch commends Lycurgus for having forbidden Spartan citizens to engage in manual labor or commercial activity. As a consequence, while Athenians valued commerce and industry, Spartans disdained work as an activity fit only for slaves. When one day a certain Spartan, elsewhere identified as Herondas (Apophthegmata Laconica 221C), visited Athens and witnessed an Athenian condemned for idleness, he wondered how anyone could be punished for living like a free man or eleutherias (Life of Lycurgus 54E). Amyot rendered this passage in terms familiar to a French Renaissance audience: “le Lacedaemonien adonc pria ceulx qui estoient auprès de luy, qu'ilz luy monstrassent celuy qui avoit esté condemné pour vivre noblement et en gentilhomme. Ce que j'ai allegué pour monstrer combien il estimoit estre chose roturiere et servile, que d'exercer aucun mestier mechanique, ou faire aucun ouvrage de main pour gaigner de l'argent.”¹⁸ In this way, Amyot assimilates Sparta's peculiar social system, based on the division between citizens and helots, to the values prevailing among the feudal nobility in sixteenth-century France. This in turn accounts for how the praise of Sparta can help to confirm Montaigne's own credentials as a nobleman.

Spartan nobility goes together with Spartan anti-intellectualism in Montaigne's reasoning. “Du pedantisme” insists on Spartan indifference to knowledge: “C'est chose digne de tres-grande consideration que, en cette excellente police de Licurgus … il s'y face si peu de mention de la doctrine” (p. 142). Spartans disdain rhetoric, as we have already been informed, and prefer ethical to intellectual effort (p. 143). Above all, they profit militarily from their aversion to knowledge: “Les exemples nous apprennent, et en cette martiale police et en toutes ses semblables, que l'estude des sciences amollit et effemine les courages, plus qu'il ne les fermit et aguerrit” (p. 143). This praise of Sparta responds to a variety of motives, including the simple desire to confound the humanist consensus. While the humanist ideal integrated arms with letters, Montaigne admires Sparta's unlettered armies and while humanism saw itself in the Athenian tradition, Montaigne scandalously prefers Athens' philistine rival.¹⁹ If Montaigne uses Sparta against the humanists, he does so in part to reaffirm his own social legitimacy in the face of all those whose humanist training helped them to achieve social mobility in the Renaissance.²⁰ Spartan anti-humanism thus represents a type of social stasis that appeals to those in a dynamic society who are already integrated into the social elite.

The praise of Sparta is complicated by the tendency of the Essais to associate laconism with Stoicism, which is never entirely exempt from Montaigne's lucid critique of immoderation. Already in the Hellenistic Age, Stoic ethical theory appealed for its authority to the example of Spartan austerity and impassivity, as illustrated by the laconic apothegms; and the popularity of Stoicism, in the estimation of Elizabeth Rawson, “ensured the survival of sympathy for Sparta.”²¹ Montaigne involves Spartan examples in his investigation of such characteristic Stoic themes as suicide (II,3), anger (II,31), and endurance (II,32). The essay “Coustume de l'Isle de Cea,” after an initial disclaimer of impiety, considers arguments for and against suicide. The case for suicide is based on passages from Seneca's Moral Epistles and anecdotes from the Apophthegmata Laconica, which together yield a sort of lacono-Stoicism whose main tenet is the identification of suicide with freedom. As the preeminent free people of antiquity, the Spartans are specialists in suicide, which is not the most inspiring argument for freedom. Having made the case for suicide, Montaigne is eager to acknowledge a counter argument: “Cecy ne s'en va pas sans contraste” (p. 352). The main principle of his counter argument seems to be that life is too unpredictable to know when to end it (p. 354). The counter argument also reserves a place for Spartan heroism in the person of King Cleomenes, who was more Stoic than the Stoics. When counseled to take his own life rather than prolong his misfortunes, he refused the advice “d'un courage Lacedemonien et Stoique” (p. 354). Of course, he later committed suicide anyway. Montaigne's anti-dogmatic survey of arguments for and against suicide tends to encourage a skeptical irresolution rather than any Stoic resolution. One aspect of the essay that shouldn't be ignored is Montaigne's fascination with examples of collective suicide, of which an unacknowledged archetype is the Battle of Thermopylae. The inhabitants of Abydos, Astapa, and an unnamed city in India all prefer collective suicide to surrender in what Montaigne calls a “nouvelle guerre” (p. 359) where the combatants kill their fellow citizens rather than their enemy. This type of self-combat is not without ominous implications for the Wars of Religion, where the French fight like Stoics.²²

In “De la colere” Montaigne questions the Stoic ideal of conquering one's emotions. The essay begins with an emprunt from Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus in praise of Spartan pedagogy. One advantage of Sparta's state-supervised education was that it rescued children from the unregulated anger of parents. From this encomiastic exordium, the essay develops the theme of anger without much reference to Sparta except for the example of Lycurgus' nephew Charillus who, like other, non-Spartan figures, refrained from acting in anger lest his actions be unjust (p. 717). In contrast to the Stoic figures who press their emotions deep within their breast, Montaigne favors the release of the emotions. He deems it better to express than to suppress anger: “et aymerois mieux produire mes passions que de les couver à mes despens” (p. 719). Thus the narrator of the Essais inverts the Stoic posture of Aeneas: “spem vultu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem” (Aeneid 1.209). In effect, he prefers humanity to heroism. In the course of the essay, the only place aside from the beginning where Montaigne dwells on Spartan examples is an apparent digression which begins: “Le dire est autre chose que le faire” (p. 715). This is an eminently anti-Spartan sentiment, and Montaigne is eager to qualify his point with Spartan examples of the coincidence of speech and action such as the decision of the ephors to prevent a bad man from giving a good speech (p. 716). It is not clear what the relationship of speech and action has to do with anger, but this relationship is clearly central to the poetics of the Essais. Montaigne would like to reconcile speech and action in his writing so as to achieve a laconic harmony of word and deed. Thus he advises his student to speak through his actions: “Il ne dira pas tant sa leçon comme il la fera. Il la repetera en ses actions” (I,26,p. 168). The Essais purport to be the experience of their author and not merely his words. Yet at times Montaigne is obliged to acknowledge the disjunction of speech and action in the most telling terms: “Tel faict des Essais qui ne sauroit faire des effaicts” (III,9,p. 992). As the embodiment of the ideal union of “le faire et le dire” (p. 716), the Spartans set a standard which Montaigne is not always confident of having met.

The Spartans set an even more ambivalent standard in the essay “Defense de Seneque et Plutarque,” where they embody the Stoic ideal of patience. Here, after a perfunctory defense of Seneca against Protestant propagandists relying on the malicious testimony of Dio Cassius, Montaigne turns to his main task, which is to defend Plutarch against the criticisms of Jean Bodin. In chapter four of his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem on the choice of historians, Bodin offers a divided assessment of Plutarch's Lives. First he praises the historian's wide experience of affairs and remarkably free judgment of princes, and then he damns him for his credulity and his bad faith, not to mention his inaccuracy in dealing with Roman institutions, which is the point that concerns Bodin the most and Montaigne the least. Montaigne devotes most of his attention to the first accusation: “saepe incredibilia et plane fabulosa narrat,” which Bodin exemplifies with the famous anecdote from the Life of Lycurgus (51B) of the Spartan boy who stole a fox and endured incredible torment rather than reveal his theft.²³ What strikes Bodin as incredible does not even seem rare and strange to Montaigne, so deeply is he imbued with admiration for Spartan greatness: “Je suis si imbu de la grandeur de ces hommes là que non seulement il ne me semble, comme à Bodin, que son conte soit incroyable, que je ne le trouve pas seulement rare et estrange” (p. 723). To defend Plutarch, Montaigne cites even more extravagant examples of Spartan endurance from a variety of sources before appealing to examples from Roman history of heroic or maniacal imperviousness to torture. This leads inevitably to a modern parallel. The partisan passion of civil war has inspired even the French to feats of neo-Spartan (and neo-Stoic) endurance of physical suffering, which Montaigne calls “la patience”: “Et qui s'enquerra à nos argolets des experiences qu'ils ont euës en ces guerres civiles, il se trouvera des effets de patience, d'obstination et d'opiniatreté, par-my nos miserables siecles et en cette tourbe molle et effeminée encore plus que l'Egyptienne, dignes d'estre comparez à ceux que nous venons de reciter de la vertu Spartaine” (p. 724). There follows a series of vignettes of tortured peasants that would do justice to D'Aubigné's Tragiques. The obstinate and intransigent courage of France's civil warriors does not earn Montaigne's unqualified approval as we can sense from the phrase with which he concludes his examples: “Combien en a l'on veu se laisser patiemment brusler et rotir pour des opinions empruntées d'autruy, ignorées et inconnues” (p. 725). The patience which France has inherited from Sparta is a form of religious fanaticism that has engulfed France in civil war.²⁴

Montaigne refers to the Wars of Religion ostensibly in order to refute Bodin and confirm Plutarch's veracity, but his argument trips on its own logic. Montaigne insists that we cannot judge others by our own standards: “Il ne faut pas juger ce qui est possible et ce qui ne l'est pas, selon ce qui est croyable et incroyable à nostre sens” (p. 725). In other words, Bodin was wrong to judge Plutarch's Spartan anecdotes by French standards. Yet if this is so, how can Montaigne confirm Plutarch's anecdotes with French examples? Historical relativism would seem to preclude any comparison or indeed any judgment of the past. Once again, as in “De la vanité des paroles,” Montaigne runs into the problem of the disproportion of past and present, which is surely one of the key issues in the praise of Sparta. How can we draw a parallel between modern experience and ancient examples, especially in reference to an author whose historiography is based on the principle of parallel lives or comparison of figures from different times and places? One of Bodin's accusations concerns that very principle. While willing to grant that Plutarch compares Greeks to Greeks and Romans to Romans bona fide, Bodin rejects the parallels drawn between Greeks and Romans. In his estimation, there is no comparison, for the Greeks are as inferior to the Romans as a fly is to an elephant: “quid autem aliud est Agesilaum Pompeio, quam muscam Elephanto conferre?”²⁵ The comparison of a fly to an elephant was a proverbial figure for hyperbole or exaggeration according to Erasmus' adage “Elephantum ex musca facis” (Adages 869) which in turn refers to Lucian's paradoxical Muscae encomium. In effect, the comparison of unlike terms is a resource of paradoxical encomium and any comparison of past and present is fraught with paradox. Certainly, it is paradoxical for a Frenchman to praise a Spartan, for the two societies are as unlike as a fly and an elephant. Yet, despite their “soft and effeminate” decadence, the French are like the Spartans in their fanatical obstinacy, which is a dubious virtue in the context of civil war. Thus the Spartans are both anachronistic and exemplary, and their example can be deleterious when it is not elusive.

Though they seem to have bequeathed their worst qualities to the modern era, the Spartans may have another lesson to teach the French, one deserving of unqualified praise. For, as we learn from the essay “De la coustume et de ne changer aisément une loy receüe” (I,23), the Spartans are capable of an unexpected suppleness or flexibility that Montaigne's compatriots would do well to emulate. “De la coustume” is an interesting blend of relativism and conservatism where the author unmasks the “violent prejudice of custom” (p. 117) only to affirm his complete fidelity to law and tradition and his utter abhorrence of innovation. The novelty which most appalls him is the Reformation and the revolt against royal authority by Huguenots and Ligueurs alike. The disasters wrought by civil war offer the most compelling argument for conservatism. Not surprisingly, Montaigne's patrons in conservatism are the Spartans, who are so intolerant of innovation that they even forbid the musician Phrynis to add two new strings to the heptachord lyre (p. 119 from Apophthegmata Laconica 220C). The case for conservatism can also appeal to skepticism, since the innovator can never calculate the consequences of his innovation and so reform exceeds the capacity of human intelligence (p. 121).

And yet, despite all its resistance to innovation, the essay concludes that sometimes it is necessary to change the law in order to cope with changing circumstances. Even the Spartans, “tant religieux observateurs des ordonnances de leur païs,” understood the need to compromise the law in times of duress, as Montaigne illustrates with several examples taken from Plutarch of Spartan conduct during the Peloponnesian War (pp. 122-23). These examples of flexibility or practicality contrast with the image of obstinacy usually associated with Sparta. In a later addition to his essay, further emended in the Bordeaux Copy, Montaigne explains the relevance of his Spartan examples to the French Wars of Religion. In times of lawlessness, he admonishes the king, legitimate authority is at a disadvantage and must learn to ignore the law if it is to survive: “L'aller legitime est un aller froid, poisant et contraint, et n'est pas pour tenir bon à un aller licencieux et effrené” (p. 122). It is not clear how Montaigne intends his advice to be taken or what license is necessary to save the monarchy. One clue to his enigmatic intentions may be the epigrammatic style in which he phrases the principle of political expediency: “et vaudroit mieux faire vouloir aux loix ce qu'elles peuvent, puis qu'elles ne peuvent ce qu'elles veulent” (p. 122). This laconic phrase sounds very much like an apothegm, suggesting that Montaigne's Essais might be seen as a modern collection of apophthegmata gallica, in keeping with Estienne Pasquier's judgment: “Mais, sur tout, son Livre est un vray seminaire de belles & notables sentences.”²⁶ The concise, chiasmic structure of the phrase from “De la coustume” appeals so much to Montaigne that he repeats a nearly identical sentence in an essay whose political context is quite clear, “De la liberté de conscience” (II,19).

The essay on freedom of conscience is a paradoxical encomium of the Emperor Julian the Apostate. Montaigne exhibits an admirable independence of mind in evaluating a figure universally reviled by Christian historians and polemicists. Perhaps what appeals most to Montaigne, apart from the pleasure of paradox, is Julian's intransigent conservatism: in an era of Christian ascendency, Julian tried to revive the pagan tradition and to defy the new religion. This makes him very much a model, however disreputable, for the French kings who defend tradition against reform. Montaigne does not let the analogy pass unnoticed. As he points out, Julian employed the very same strategy to divide his subjects, the strategy of allowing freedom of religion, as the French kings have done to unite theirs: “cela est digne de consideration, que l'Empereur Julian se sert, pour attiser le trouble de la dissention civile, de cette mesme recepte de liberté de conscience que nos Roys viennent d'employer pour l'estaindre” (p. 671). According to Pierre Villey, the context in which Montaigne draws this analogy is the peace treaty known as La Paix de Monsieur, which ended the fifth War of Religion in May, 1576 and by whose terms Henri III granted the Protestants almost unlimited freedom of worship as well as a number of other concessions.²⁷ Montaigne attributes this policy of freedom of conscience neither to treachery nor to altruism but simply to political expediency: “Et si croy mieux, pour l'honneur de la devotion de nos rois, c'est que, n'ayans peu ce qu'ils vouloient, ils ont fait semblant de vouloir ce qu'ils pouvoient” (p. 672). This striking phrase with its familiar chiasmus of “vouloir” and “pouvoir” may help us to gloss Montaigne's reflections on custom and innovation at the end of “De la coustume” where he uses a very similar sentence. There, as we recall, Montaigne hinted enigmatically that when confronted with lawless rebellion, legitimate authority ought to make the laws want to do what they can, since they can't do what they want. Perhaps the compromise he had in mind was this same policy of religious tolerance to which the Valois monarchy resorted sporadically during Montaigne's lifetime and by which Henri IV ended the Wars of Religion in 1598 with the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes. As a “politique,” Montaigne was willing to sacrifice religious orthodoxy for political stability. Since political expediency and compromise are associated in Montaigne's logic with the example of the Spartans, the praise of Sparta reveals an unexpected lesson of tolerance in compensation for its more familiar lesson of intransigence.

Montaigne's praise of Sparta belongs unmistakably to the rhetorical tradition repudiated by his Spartan heroes. Within that tradition, he cultivates especially the epideictic genre, and within that genre he shows a predilection for what is known as “adoxography” or paradoxical praise, which has been recognized as a precursor of the literary essay.²⁸ Montaigne's choice of the epideictic genre has a political significance, for since antiquity the other two genres, forensic and deliberative rhetoric, had been associated with the social and political upheaval of democratic societies. An absolutist society dispenses with all rhetoric but panegyric, as Maternus implies in Tacitus' Dialogus 41.4 and as Montaigne's contemporary Marc Antoine de Muret declares explicitly in his lectures on Cicero's Letters to Atticus. Whereas eloquence used to rule in the lawcourts and in the counsels of state, Muret observes, it has now retired from public life; so that of the three genres of rhetoric recognized by Aristotle, only the epideictic genre remains in use.²⁹ The rhetoric of praise and blame survives, because it alone escapes the stigma of popular agitation.

Montaigne exercises his rhetorical skills in praise of Sparta in order to construct a comprehensive political, social, ethical and esthetic ideal of nobility. The Spartans offer an irreproachable model of noble candor, laconic wit, elitist prejudices, and even an invaluable ability to compromise their own rigid ideals when circumstances require it. As consecrated by literary tradition, Spartan virtue appears almost entirely innocent of formal study and as such is easily assimilated to the feudal ethos of the French nobility, which Montaigne claims uneasily as his own. Moreover, Spartan ignorance is not only a figure of social legitimacy but also, as Paul Porteau has suggested, an irresistible argument for an author enamored of paradox.³⁰ One of the attractions of paradox, apart from the mental exercise it affords, is the affinity it claims for disinterested truth against the tyranny of opinion.³¹

To praise an ancient society, notorious even in its own day for exaggerated conservatism, is to invite awareness of anachronism from a modern audience. Again and again Montaigne stumbles on the disparity between past and present that undermines all historical analogy. This does not deter him from asserting the exemplarity of the ancients but makes this assertion self-consciously problematic. To a large degree, the praise of Sparta is an essay on historical relativism as well as an exercise in epideictic rhetoric.

Finally, admiration for Sparta puts Montaigne in a tradition with its own contested relation to orthodoxy. Montaigne empathizes with such notorious laconists as Socrates, Plato and Xenophon, who were all dissenters if not defectors from Athenian democracy. Ancient laconism, as François Ollier has shown, was the peculiar appanage of oligarchs in a democratic society.³² Montaigne's position bears some analogy to the founders of literary laconism, for he is a defector from modernity and a dissenter toward humanism. He is a non-conformist in respect to the emerging institutions and ideals, whether mercantile, scientific, or dogmatic, of the modern world. The praise of Sparta, presented as paradoxical encomium, is one way for Montaigne to confirm his independence from the certainties of a new age.

Notes

1. Plutarch, Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata 192C. The authenticity of the Apophthegmata has been contested, but the recent edition by François Fuhrmann for “Les Belles Lettres” accepts Plutarch's authorship.

2. At least two other studies have addressed Montaigne's admiration for Sparta: Hélène Moreau, “Sparte, une figure de l'autre dans les Essais”, in Kyriaki Christodoulou ed., Montaigne et la Grèce (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990) pp. 116-22, and Robert Aulotte, “‘Du Pedantisme’: Laus Lycurgo Lacedaemoniisque”, in Kyriaki Christodoulou ed., Montaigne et l'histoire des hellènes (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994) pp. 131-38. James Supple surveys Montaigne's attitude to Sparta in Arms versus Letters. The Military and Literary Ideals in the “Essais” of Montaigne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) pp. 97-103.

3. Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and V.L. Saulnier (Paris: PUF, 1978). All quotations of Montaigne are drawn from this edition as are all references to Villey's commentary.

4. For Protagoras' doctrine of the two logoi, see Mario Untersteiner, I sofisti, vol. I (Milan: Lampugnani Nigri, 1967) pp. 47-54.

5. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism book 1, chapter 6 “Peri archon tes skepseos.”

6. “Cum Busiridem laudarit Polycrates et huius castigator Isocrates, iniusticiam Glauco, Thersiten et quartanam febrim Favorinus, calvicium Synesius, muscam et parasiticam Lucianus.” Erasmus, Opera omnia, vol. IV, pt. 3, ed. Clarence Miller (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1979) p. 68. Erasmus expands on the list of “infames materias sive inopinabiles” given in Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, book 17, chapter 12. Arthur Pease has studied this tradition in his article “Things Without Honor”, Classical Philology 21 (1926) pp. 27-42.

7. For a comprehensive survey of this tradition, see Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). François Ollier studies the idealization of Sparta in classical antiquity in Le mirage Spartiate (Paris: Boccard, 1933).

8. Fragment 597 in Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, vol. III B, pt. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1950) p. 730.

9. Friedrich Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit, vol. II (Leipzig: Teubner, 1892) p. 370.

10. Jacoby, Fragmente, vol. III B, pt. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1955) pp. 667-68; Rawson, The Spartan Tradition, p. 36.

11. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, book 8, Thrasea 13: “Interrogatus quid esset Rhetorica; ‘Ex parvis’, inquit, ‘facere magna, ex magnis parva.’” This definition, unaccountably attributed to the Roman Stoic Thrasea Paetus, recalls the definition falsely credited to Isocrates in the Lives of the Ten Orators in Plutarch's Moralia 838F. All of these sources may look back to Plato's Phaedrus 267A where Socrates says that Tisias and Gorgias make small things appear big and big things small. Montaigne found the analogy between the rhetor and the cobbler, attributed to the Spartan King Agesilaus, in Les oeuvres morales et meslées de Plutarque, trans. Jacques Amyot, vol. I (Paris, 1572) fol. 209v: “On louoit en sa presence un maistre de Retorique, de ce qu'il pouvoit par son eloquence amplifier et rendre grandes les choses petites: et au contraire, appetisser les grandes: Ie ne trouverois pas bon, dit il, un cordouannier, qui à un petit pied chausseroit un grand soulier.”

12. Erasmus, Opera omnia, vol. II, pt. 4, eds. Felix Heinimann and Emanuel Kienzle (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1987) p. 306.

13. For Montaigne's debt to Tacitus's dialogue, see Morris Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. Max Patrick (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966) p. 65 and Marc Fumaroli, L'Age de l'éloquence (Geneva: Droz, 1980) pp. 69-70.

14. Tacitus, Dialogus de oratoribus, ed. Alain Michel (Paris: PUF, 1962) p. 127.

15. See Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, “L'Intertexte rhétorique: Tacite, Quintilien et la poétique des Essais”, in John O'Brien, Malcolm Quainton, and James Supple eds, Montaigne et la rhétorique (Paris: Champion, 1995) pp. 17-26.

16. Montaigne does not enter into the constitutional debate over Sparta's status as a mixed state, and in that respect he ignores one of the major issues of the Spartan tradition. See Rawson, The Spartan Tradition, cit. in n. 7 above, ch. 11.

17. One instance of his unease is the passage from “De la vanité” where he seems greatly to exaggerate the antiquity of his family's noble title: “Quel remede? c'est le lieu de ma naissance, et de la plus part de mes ancestres: ils y ont mis leur affection et leur nom” (III,9,p. 970). As others have noted, Montaigne deliberately reverses the priority of family name and land tenure in this phrase, and his fabrication of his own origins may well betray a deep-seated social insecurity. For a different opinion, see Supple, Arms versus Letters, cit. in n. 2 above, pp. 39-43.

18. Les vies des hommes illustres de Plutarque, trans. Jacques Amyot, vol. I (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Cussac, 1783) pp. 198-99.

19. For a survey of humanist pronouncements on arms and letters, see Supple, Arms versus Letters, ch. 3. One of the founding expressions of humanist emulation of Athenian tradition was Leonardo Bruni's Laudatio Florentinae Urbis modeled on Publius Aelius Aristides's Panathenaic Oration.

20. For the role of humanist education in the transformation of the social hierarchy in Renaissance Europe, see Gilbert Gadoffre, La révolution culturelle dans la France des humanistes (Geneva: Droz, 1997); George Huppert, Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes. An Essay on the Definition of Elites in Renaissance France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); and J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) ch. 4 “The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance.”

21. Rawson, The Spartan Tradition, cit. in n. 7 above, p. 90.

22. For the connection between Stoicism and civil war in the Essais, see David Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy. Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

23. Jean Bodin, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Pierre Mesnard (Paris: PUF, 1951) p. 132. Montaigne recounts the same anecdote in I, 14, p. 59.

24. See Quint, The Quality of Mercy, pp. 93-94 for an illuminating reading of II,32.

25. Bodin, Oeuvres, p. 132.

26. Lettres 18,1. Cited from Estienne Pasquier, Choix de lettres, ed. D. Thickett (Geneva: Droz, 1956) p. 47.

27. Arlette Jouanna, La France du XVIe siècle 1483-1598 (Paris: PUF, 1997) p. 510 summarizes the terms of the treaty as follows: “Le culte réformé est permis quasiment partout, sauf à Paris et deux lieues alentour, et dans les villes où séjourne la cour. Les réformés obtiennent huit places de sũreté et des chambres mi-parties dans chaque Parlement.”

28. Pease, “Things Without Honor”, cit. in n. 6 above, p. 34. See also Paul J. Smith, “‘J'honnore le plus ceux que j'honnore le moins’ Paradoxe et discours chez Montaigne”, in Ronald Landheer and Paul J. Smith eds, Le paradoxe en linguistique et en littérature (Geneva: Droz, 1996) pp. 173-97.

29. “Eloquentia, quasi aetatis beneficio immunitatem consecuta, iussa est oblectare se in his nostris scholasticis ac pulverulentis disputationibus, in sacris concionibus, quae ad populum habentur, et interdum in gratulationibus, quae fiunt ad principes aut in eorum funeribus exornandis. Ita ex illis tribus Aristoteleis dicendi generibus solum epidicticon, quod olim minimi pretii habebatur, in usu relictum est.” Muret, Opera omnia, ed. C. H. Frotscher, vol. I (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971) p. 406.

30. Paul Porteau, “Sur un paradoxe de Montaigne”, in Mélanges de littérature, d'histoire et de philologie offerts à Paul Laumonier par ses élèves et ses amis (Paris: Droz, 1935) pp. 329-46.

31. Such is the claim of its practitioners. See for example the proemium to Libanius' Psogos Achilleos in Libanii opera, ed. Richard Foerster, vol. VIII (Leipzig: Teubner, 1915) p. 282.

32. Ollier, Le mirage Spartiate, cit. in n. 7 above.