2. On drunkenness

[Drunkenness was considered a form of ecstasy, in which body and soul became separated or loosely joined. From Ancient times it was associated with the higher ecstasies (those of mystics, poets, prophets and lovers) as well as with the ecstasy of wonder, of bravery and of fear. (In his Paraphrases on the New Testament Erasmus has a long section explaining the rapture of the disciples at Pentecost by analogy with the effects of drunkenness, of which the disciples were accused.) Montaigne is wary of ecstasy and despises excessive drinking, which is for him a rapture not of the mind but the body.]

[A] The world is all variation and dissimilarity. Vices are all the same in that they are vices – and doubtless the Stoics understand matters after that fashion: but even though they are equally vices they are not equal vices. That a man who has overstepped by a hundred yards those limits

quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum,

[beyond which, and short of which, there is no right way,]

should not be in a worse condition than a man who has only overstepped them by ten yards is not believable; nor that sacrilege should be no worse than stealing a cabbage from our garden:

Nec vincet ratio, tantumdem ut peccet idemque

Qui teneros caules alieni fregerit horti,

Et qui nocturnus divum sacra legerit.

[Reason cannot convince me that there is equal sinfulness in trampling down someone’s spring cabbages and in robbing the temple-treasures in the night.]fn1

There is as much diversity in vice as in anything else.

[B] It is dangerous to confound the rank and importance of sins: murderers, traitors and tyrants gain too much by it. It is not reasonable that they should be able to salve their consciences because somebody else is lazy, lascivious or not assiduous in his prayers. Each man comes down heavily on his neighbours’ sins and lessens the weight of his own. Even the doctors of the Church often rank sins badly to my taste.

[C] Just as Socrates said that the prime duty of wisdom is to distinguish good from evil,fn2 we, whose best always partakes of vice, should say the same about knowing how to distinguish between the vices: if that is not done exactingly, the virtuous man and the vicious man will be jumbled unrecognizedly together.

[A] Now drunkenness, considered among other vices, has always seemed to me gross and brutish. In others our minds play a larger part; and there are some vices which have something or other magnanimous about them, if that is the right word. There are some which are intermingled with learning, diligence, valour, prudence, skill and finesse: drunkenness is all body and earthy. Moreover the grossest nation of our day is alone in honouring it.fn3 Other vices harm our intellect: this one overthrows it; [B] and it stuns the body:

cum vinis vis penetravit,

Consequitur gravitas membrorum, prcepediuntur

Crura vacillanti, tardescit lingua, madet mens,

Nant oculi; clamor, singultus, jurgia gliscunt.

[when the strength of the wine has sunk in, our limbs become heavy, we stagger and trip over our legs; our speech becomes slow; our mind, sodden; our eyes are a-swim. Then comes the din, the hiccoughs and the fights.]fn4

[C] The worst state for a man is when he loses all consciousness and control of himself.

[A] And among other things they say that, just as the must fermenting in the wine-jar stirs up all the lees at the bottom, so too does wine unbung the most intimate secrets of those who have drunk beyond measure:

[B] tu sapientium

Curas et arcanum jocoso

Consilium retegis Liceo.

[in those jolly Bacchic revels you, my wine-jar, uncover worries and the secret counsels of the wise.]fn5

[A] Josephusfn6 tells how he wheedled secrets out of an ambassador sent to him by his enemies by making him drink a lot. Nevertheless Augustus confided his most private secrets to Lucius Piso, the conqueror of Thrace, and was never let down; nor was Tiberius let down by Cossus on whom he unburdened all of his plans: yet we know that those two men were so given to drinking that they had often to be carried out of the Senate, both drunk,fn7

Externo inflatum venas de more Lycæo.

[With veins swollen with others’ wine, as usual.]fn8

[C] And the plan to kill Caesar was well kept when confided to Cassius, who drank water, but also when confided to Cimber, who often got drunk; which explains his joking reply: ‘Should I bear the weight of a tyrant, when I cannot bear the weight of my wine!’fn9 [A] Even our German mercenaries when drowned in their wine remember where they are quartered, the password and their rank:

[B] nec facilis victoria de madidis, et

Blæsis, atque mero titubantibus.

[it is not easy to beat them, even when they are sodden-drunk, incoherent and staggering about.]fn10

[C] I would never have thought anybody could be buried so insensibly in drunkenness if I had not read the following in the history books. With the purpose of inflicting on him some notable indignity, Attalus invited to supper that Pausanias who, on this very subject, later killed Philip King of Macedonia (a king whose fine qualities nevertheless bore witness to the education he had received in the household and company of Epaminondas). He got him to drink so much that he could bring him, quite unaware of what he was doing, to abandon his fair body to mule-drivers and to many of the most abject scullions in his establishment, as if it were the body of some whore in a hedgerow.fn11

And then there is the case told me by a lady whom I honour and hold in the greatest esteem: towards Castres, near Bordeaux, where her house is, there was a village woman, a widow of chaste reputation, who, becoming aware of the first hints that she might be pregnant, told the women of the neighbourhood that if only she had a husband she would think she was expecting. But as the reason for her suspicions grew bigger every day and finally became evident, she was reduced to having a declaration made from the pulpit in her parish church, stating that if any man would admit what he had done she promised to forgive him and, if he so wished, to marry him. One of her young farm-labourers took courage at this proclamation and stated that he had found her one feast-day by her fireside after she had drunk her wine freely; she was so deeply and provocatively asleep that he had been able to have her without waking her up. They married each other and are still alive.

[A] Antiquity, certainly, did not greatly condemn this vice. The very writings of several philosophers speak of it indulgently; even among the Stoics there are those who advise you to let yourself drink as much as you like occasionally and to get drunk so as to relax your soul:

[B] Hoc quoque virtutum quondam certamine, magnum

Socratem palmam promeruisse ferunt.

[They say that Socrates often carried off the prize in this trial of strength too.]fn12

[C] That Censor and corrector of others,fn13 [A] Cato was reproached for his heavy drinking:

[B] Narratur et prisci Catonis

Sæpe mero caluisse virtus.

[It is told how the virtue of old Cato was often warmed with wine].fn14

[A] Such a famous King as Cyrus cited among the praiseworthy qualities which made him preferable to his brother Artaxerxes the fact that he knew how to drink better. Even among the best regulated and best governed peoples it was very common to assay men by making them drunk. I have heard one of the best doctors in Paris, Silvius, state that it is a good thing once a month to arouse our stomachs by this excess so as to stop their powers from getting sluggish and to stimulate them in order to prevent their growing dull. [B] And we can read that the Persians discussed their most important affairs after drinking wine.fn15

[A] My taste and my complexion are more hostile than my reason to this vice. For, leaving aside the fact that I readily allow my beliefs to be captive to the Ancients, I find this vice base and stultifying but less wicked and a cause of less harm than the others, which virtually all do more direct public damage to our society. And if, as they maintain, we can never enjoy ourselves without it costing us something, I find that this vice costs our conscience less than the others: besides it is not a negligible consideration that it is easy to provide for and easy to find.

[C] A man advanced in years and rank told me that he counted drink among the three main pleasures left to him in this life.fn16 But he set about it in the wrong way; for fine palates and an anxious selecting of wine are to be absolutely avoided. If you base your pleasure on drinking good wine you are bound to suffer from sometimes drinking bad. Your taste ought to be more lowly and more free. To be a good drinker you must not have too tender a palate. The Germans enjoy drinking virtually any wine. Their aim is to gulp it rather than to taste it. They get a better bargain. Their pleasure is more abundant and closer at hand.

Secondly, to drink in the French style at both meals, but moderately for fear of your health, is too great a restraint on the indulgence of god Bacchus: more time and constancy are required. The Ancients spent entire nights in this occupation and often went on into the next day. So we should train our habit in wider firmer ways. I have seen in my time a great lord, a person famous for his successes in several expeditions of high importance, who effortlessly and in the course of his ordinary meals never drank less than two gallons of wine and who, after that, never showed himself other than most sage and well-advised in the conduct of our affairs.

We should allow more time to that pleasure which we wish to count on over the whole of our lives. Like shop-apprentices and workmen we ought to refuse no opportunity for a drink; we ought always to have the desire for one in our heads: it seems that we are cutting down this particular one all the time and that, as I saw as a boy, dinner parties, suppers, and late-night feasts used to be much more frequent and common in our houses than they are now. Could we really be moving towards an improvement in something at least! Certainly not. It is because we throw ourselves into lechery much more than our fathers did. Those two occupations impede each other’s strength. On the one hand lechery has weakened our stomachs: on the other, sober drinking has rendered us vigorous and lively in our love-making.

It is wonderful what accounts I heard my father give of the chastity of his times. He had the right to say so, as he was both by art and nature most graceful in the company of ladies. He talked little and well; he intermingled his speech with elegant references to books in the vernacular, especially Spanish, and among the Spanish he frequently cited the so-called Marco Aurelio.fn17 His face bore an expression of gentle seriousness, humble and very modest; he took particular care to be respectable and decent in his person and his dress both on horse and on foot. He was enormously faithful to his word and, in all things, conscientious and meticulous, tending rather towards over-scrupulousness. For a small man he was very strong, straight and well-proportioned; his face was pleasing and rather brown; he was skilled and punctilious in all gentlemanly sports. I have also seen some canes filled with lead with which he is said to have exercised his arms for throwing the bar and the stone or for fencing, as well as shoes shod with lead to improve his running and jumping. Folk recall little miracles of his at the long-jump. When he was over sixty I remember him laughing at our own agility by vaulting into the saddle in his furry gown, by putting his weight on his thumb and leaping over a table and by never going up to his room without jumping three or four steps at a time. But more to my subject, he said that there was hardly one woman of quality in the whole province who was ill-spoken of, and he would tell of men – especially himself – who were on remarkably intimate terms with decent women without a breath of suspicion. In his own case he solemnly swore that he came virgin to his marriage-bed; and yet he had long done his bit in the transalpine wars, leaving a detailed diary of events there, both public and personal. And he married on his return from Italy in 1528 at the mature age of thirty-three.

Let us get back to our bottles.

[A] The disadvantages of old age (which has need of support and renewal) could reasonably give birth to a desire for drink, since a capacity for wine is virtually the last pleasure which the passing years steal from us.

According to our drinking fraternity natural heat first gets a hold on our feet; that concerns our childhood; from there it rises to our loins where it long settles in, producing there if you ask me the only true bodily pleasures of this life: [C] in comparison, the other pleasures are half asleep. [A] Finally, like a mist rising and evaporating, it lands in the gullet and makes there its last abode.

[B] For all that, I do not understand how anyone can prolong the pleasure of drinking beyond his thirst, forging in his mind an artificial appetite which is contrary to nature. My stomach would never get that far: it has enough bother dealing with what it takes in for its needs. [C] I am so constituted that I care little for drink except at dessert; that is why my last draught is usually my biggest. Anacharsis was amazed that the Greeks should drink out of bigger glasses at the end of their meals;fn18 it was I think for the same reason that the Germans do: that is when they start their drinking contests.

Plato forbids young people to drink before the age of eighteen and to get drunk before forty. But men over forty he tells to enjoy it and to bring copiously into their banquets the influence of Dionysius, that kind god who restores gaiety to grown men and youth to the old ones, who calms and softens the passions of the soul just as iron is softened by the fire. And in his Laws he considers convivial drinking to be useful (provided that the group has a leader to ensure that order is maintained), since getting drunk is a good and certain trial of each man’s character and, at the same time, has the property of giving older men the idea of enjoying themselves in music and dancing, useful pastimes which they would not dare to engage in when of settled mind. Wine also has the capacity of tempering the soul and giving health to the body. Nevertheless he liked the following restrictions, partly borrowed from the Carthaginians: that it should be done without on military expeditions; that all statesmen and judges should abstain when about to perform their duties and to deliberate on matters of public concern; that the daytime should be avoided – that is owed to other activities – as well as any night when we intend to beget children.fn19

They say that the philosopher Stilpo, weighed down by old age, deliberately hastened his death by drinking his wine without water. A similar cause suffocated the failing powers of the aged philosopher Arcesilaus, but that was unintentional.fn20

[A] Whether the soul of a wise man should be such as to surrender to the power of wine is an old and entertaining question:

Si ‘munitae adhibet vim sapientiae’.

[Whether ‘wine should be able to make an assault on secure wisdom’.]fn21

To what inanities are we driven by that good opinion we men have of ourselves! The best governed Soul in the world has quite enough to do to stay on her feet and to keep herself from falling to the ground from her own weakness. Not one in a thousand can stand up calm and straight for one instant in her life; it can even be doubted, given her natural condition, whether she ever can. But if you add constancy as well, then that is her highest perfection: I mean if nothing should shake it, something which hundreds of events can do. It was no good that great poet Lucretius philosophizing and bracing himself: a love-potion drove him insane. Do they think that an apoplexy will not make Socrates lose his wits as much as a porter? Some have forgotten their own names by the force of an illness, and a light wound has struck down the judgement of others. A man can be as wise as he likes: he is still a man; and what is there more frail, more wretched, more a thing of nothing, than man? Wisdom cannot force our natural properties:

[B] Sudores itaque et pallorem existere toto

Corpore, et infringi linguam, vocemque aboriri,

Caligare oculos, sonere aures, succidere artus,

Denique concidere ex animi terrore videmus.

[Then we see sweat and pallor take over his whole body, his tongue grows incoherent, his voice fails, his eyes are troubled, his ears begin to ring, his legs give way and he falls to the ground, as panic seizes his mind.]fn22

[A] When he is threatened with a blow nothing can stop a man closing his eyes, or trembling if you set him on the edge of a precipice, [C] just like a child, Nature reserving to herself these signs of her authority, signs slight but unattackable by reason or Stoic virtue, in order to teach Man that he is mortal and silly. [A] He becomes livid with fear; he reddens with shame; he bewails an attack of colic paroxysms if not with a loud cry of despair at least with a cry which is broken and wheezing.

Humani a se nihil alienum putet!

[Let him realize that nothing human is a stranger to him!]fn23

Poets [C] who can make up anything they like [A] dare not relieve their heroes even of the burden of weeping:

Sic fatur lachrymans, classique immittit habenas.

[Thus spoke Aeneas through his tears and his fleet sailed unbridled away.]fn24

It suffices that a man should rein in his affections and moderate them, for it is not in his power to suppress them. And my very own Plutarch – so perfect, so outstanding a judge of human actions – when confronted by Brutus and Torquatus killing their children was led to doubt whether virtue could really get that far, and whether those great men had not in fact been shaken by some passion or other.fn25 All actions which exceed the usual limits are open to sinister interpretations, since higher things are no more to our taste than inferior ones.

[C] Let us leave aside that other School which makes an express profession of pride.fn26 Yet even in that third School which is reckoned to be the most indulgent of them all we hear similar boastings from Metrodorus:fn27 ‘Occupavi te, Fortuna, atque cepi; omnesque aditus tuos interclusi, ut ad me aspirare non posses.’ [I have forestalled you, O Fortune, and I have caught you; I have blocked off all your approaches, you cannot get near me.]

When Anaxarchus, on the orders of Nicocreon, Tyrant of Cyprus, was put into a stone mortar and beaten to death with blows from an iron pestle, he never ceased to cry, ‘Go on! Strike, bash on, you are not pounding Anaxarchus but his casing’;fn28 [A] when we hear our Christian martyrs shouting out to the tyrant from the midst of the flames, ‘It is well roasted on this side; chop it off and eat it; it is cooked just right: now start on the other side’; when we hear in Josephusfn29 of the boy who was torn to pieces with clawed pincers and bored through by the bradawls of Antiochus, yet who still defied him, crying out in a firm assured voice: ‘Tyrant! You are wasting your time! I am still here, quite comfortable! Where is this pain, where are those tortures you were threatening me with? Is this all you can do? My constancy hurts you more than your cruelty hurts me! You cowardly beggar! It is you who are surrendering: I am growing stronger! Make me lament, make me give way, make me surrender, if you can! Goad on your henchmen and your hangmen: they have lost heart and can do nothing more! Give them weapons! Egg them on!’ – then we have to admit that there is some change for the worse in their souls, some frenzy, no matter how holy.

When we hear such Stoic paradoxes as, ‘I would rather be raging mad than a voluptuary’ [C] – that is the saying of Antisthenes,fn30 [A] Mavείειv μάλλοv ή ήΟείειv – when Sextius tells us that he would rather be transfixed by pain than by pleasure; when Epicurus decides to treat gout as though it were tickling him, refuses rest and good health, light-heartedly defies ills and, despising less biting pains, will not condescend to struggle in combat against them but summons and even wishes for pains which are strong and anguishing and worthy of him:

Spumantemque dari pecora inter inertia votis

Optat aprum, aut fulvum descendere monte leonem;

[Amidst his placid flock he prays to be vouchsafed some slavering boar, or that some wild lion will come down from the mountain;]fn31

who does not conclude that those are the cries of a mind which is leaping out of its lodgings? Our Soul cannot reach so high while remaining in her own place. She has to leave it and rise upwards and, taking the bit between her teeth, bear her man off, enrapture him away so far that afterwards he is amazed by what he has done; just as in war, the heat of the combat often makes the valiant soldiers take such hazardous steps that they are the first to be struck with astonishment once they have come back to themselves; so too the poets are often seized by amazement by their own works and no longer recognize the defiles through which they had passed at so fine a gallop. In their case too it is called frenzy and mania. And just as Plato says that a sedate man knocks in vain at poetry’s door, so too Aristotle says that no outstanding soul is free from a mixture of folly.fn32 He is right to call folly any leap – however praiseworthy it might be – which goes beyond our reason and our discourse. All the more so in that wisdom is a controlled handling of our soul, carried out, on our Soul’s responsibility, with measure and proportion.

[C] Plato contends that the faculty of prophesying is ‘above ourselves’; that we must be ‘outside ourselves’ when we accomplish it; our prudence must be darkened by some sleep or illness, or else snatched out of its place by a heavenly rapture.fn33