Everyone Calls Barbarism

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A king lands in Italy with his army. They point out the troops arrayed against him, warning that he faces barbarians. Pyrrhus climbs a rise, surveys the enemy camp, the order and discipline of its ranks, and corrects himself: “I know not,” he says, “what barbarians these may be (for the Greeks called all foreign nations by that name), but the disposition of this army I see is in no way barbarous.” The word was on his lips before he had seen anything. Seeing took it away.

Montaigne recounts the scene to draw a rule of perception: “One must beware of clinging to common opinions, and judge them by reason’s path, not the common voice.” The whole of Of the Cannibals works this gap between what custom plants in our mouths beforehand and what a clear eye might at last recognize.

there is nothing barbarous or savage in this nation, from what I have been told, except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own custom; as indeed it seems we have no other measure of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.

The verdict “barbarian” does not measure the other: it measures the distance between the other and my own custom. The word itself confesses as much.

In its etymology, the barbarian is the one whose language, failing to be understood, reduces to babble; the term does not describe a lesser degree of humanity but records a limit of my understanding, then mistakes it for a property of the other. We hold the opinions of our steeple to be “the perfect religion, the perfect polity”—and we have, Montaigne says, no other measure of truth than this. Just as the name we slap onto a thing ends up standing in for the thing itself, the word hurled at the foreigner stands in for encountering him.

Yet the simple man who lived among them describes a language “sweet […] with a pleasant sound,” a poetry Montaigne judges “entirely Anacreontic.” The babble was only in the ear. So Montaigne turns the blade: measured not by our custom but by reason, it is our own practices—torture, betrayal, everyday cruelty—that pass into barbarism. “We may well call them barbarians, then, by the standards of reason, but not by our own, which surpass them in every kind of barbarity.” The judge, subjected to his own measure, finds himself answerable.

What is a barbarian, for Montaigne?

Not a man of a lesser kind, but the one my custom relegates beyond the pale because his ways are not mine. The word reveals the provincialism of the speaker, never the nature of the one it names. Thus we have, to measure truth, only the opinions of the country where we were born.

This is an act of suspension. Montaigne does not set one people against another, does not crown a “noble savage”; he strips our custom of its right to be the standard of the human. The ground gives way beneath the judge’s foot—and he lets it give way, putting nothing in its place save a reason that includes us in its scrutiny.

Marcus Aurelius, for his part, does not dislodge the judge: he elevates him. Where Montaigne removes the measure, the Stoic emperor offers a higher vantage from which to regard the same foreigner. Not “you are mistaken about him,” but “look from where you are looking.”

My nature is essentially rational and social. The city, the fatherland, for me as for Antoninus, is Rome; but as a human being, my fatherland is the world.

A single reason makes us rational beings; it is common to us, and with it the law; and if these are common, “the world is, in truth, but one vast city” of which the whole human race is part. The division Greek/barbarian, Roman/foreigner, becomes what it is: a border drawn on a land that bears none. Marcus Aurelius does not deny it; he climbs high enough to see it as conventional.

The two gestures do not merge. Montaigne humbles the measure—we have no standard that is not that of our village, and judged by reason we are the first barbarians. Marcus Aurelius raises the foundation—there is a city vaster than the city, and the other is already a fellow citizen. One dislodges the judge from his tribunal, the other installs him in a broader court. Descent and ascent, suspension and elevation: two paths that nothing reconciles on the surface.

And yet they arrive at the same place. From Montaigne’s skeptical shore as from Marcus Aurelius’s cosmic city, one thing becomes impossible: to take my custom for the nature of things, and to carve the human to the measure of my own ways. The wall that turns the other into a barbarian, one shows to be of my making, the other that it lies beneath my feet, never in the world. It is the same partition, seen from this side and from beyond: neither lets it pass for real.

The king on his height had not changed his enemy. He had only, for the space of a glance, ceased to name him before seeing him.