Page:Essays Vol 1 (Ives, 1925).pdf/299
BOOK I, CHAPTER XXXI 279
routs and panic, they do not know what those are. Every man brings back as his trophy the head of the foe he has killed, and fastens it at the entrance of his abode. After they have for a long while treated their prisoners well and supplied them with all the comforts they can think of, the head man summons a great assemblage of his acquaintances. He ties a rope to one of the prisoner’s arms, (c) by the end of which he holds him at a distance of some paces, for fear of being injured by him; (@) the other arm he gives to his dearest friend to holdin the same way; and they two, before the assembly, kill him with their swords. That done, they roast him, and all eat him in common and send portions to those of their friends who are absent. This is not, as some ~ think, for sustenance, as the Scythians of old did, but to in- dicate an uttermost vengeance. And therefore,! having observed that the Portuguese, who had allied themselves with their adversaries, made use, when they captured them, of another sort of death for them, which was to bury them to the waist and cast many darts at the rest of their bodies, and hang them afterward, they thought that these people from the other part of the world, who had spread the knowledge of many villainies among their neighbours, and who were much more expert than they in all sorts of evil-doing, would not choose that sort of vengeance without good reason, and that it must be more painful than theirs; and they began to lay aside their old fashion and to follow this one.
I am not Sorry that we note the savage horribleness there is in such an action; but indeed I am sorry that, while rightly judging their misdeeds, wé are very blind to our own. I think there is more barbarism in eating a living man than a dead one, in rending by torture and racking a body still quick to feel, in slowly roasting it, in giving it to dogs and swine to be torn and eaten (as we have not only read but seen in recent days, not among long-time foes, but ‘among neighbours and fellow citizens, and, what is worse, in the guise of piety and religion), than in roasting it and eating it after it is dead. Chrysippus and Zeno, heads of the Stoic school, did indeed think that there was no harm in using a
dead body for any thing demanded by our need, and in de-
1 Es qu'il soit ainst.