epithalamium of Helen, by Theocritus; and it seems to me, that the same customs have continued ever since. All the she‐friends, relations, and acquaintance of the two families, newly allied, meet at the bagnio; several others go out of curiosity, and I believe there were that day at least two hundred women. Those that were or had been married placed themselves round the room on the marble sofas; but the virgins very hastily threw off their clothes, and appeared without other ornament or covering than their own long hair braided with pearl or ribbon. Two of them met the bride at the door, conducted by her mother and another grave relation. She was a beautiful maid of about seventeen, very richly dressed, and shining with jewels, but was presently reduced by them to the state of nature. Two others filled silver gilt pots with perfume, and began the procession, the rest following in pairs to the number of thirty. The leaders sung an epithalamium, answered by the others in chorus, and the two last led the fair bride, her eyes fixed on the ground, with a charming affectation of modesty. In this order they marched round the three large rooms of the bagnio. ’Tis not easy to represent to you the beauty of this sight, most of them being well proportioned and white skinned; all of them perfectly smooth and polished by the frequent use of bathing. After having made their tour, the bride was again led to every matron round the rooms, who saluted her with a compliment and a present, some of jewels, others pieces of stuff, handkerchiefs, or little gallantries of that nature, which she thanked them for by kissing their hands.
I was very well pleased with having seen this ceremony: and, you may believe me, that the Turkish ladies have at least as much wit and civility, nay, liberty, as ladies among us. […]
To the Abbé Conti
Constantinople, May 19, 1718
Human grandeur being here yet more unstable than anywhere else, ’tis common for the heirs of a great three‐tailed pasha not to be rich enough to keep in repair the house he built; thus, in a few years, they all fall to ruin. I was yesterday to see that of the late Grand Vizier, who was killed at Peterwaradin.2 It was built to receive his royal bride, daughter of the present Sultan, but he did not live to see her there. […] The extent of it is prodigious; the guardian assured me there are eight hundred rooms in it; I will not answer for that number, since I did not count them; but ’tis certain the number is very large, and the whole adorned with a profusion of marble, gilding, and the most exquisite painting of fruit and flowers. The windows are all sashed with the finest crystalline glass brought from England; and all the expensive magnificence that you can suppose in a palace founded by a vain young luxurious man, with the wealth of a vast empire at his command. But no part of it pleased me better than the apartments destined for the bagnios. There are two built exactly in the same manner, answering to one another; the baths, fountains, and pavements, all of white marble, the roofs gilt, and the walls covered with Japan china; but adjoining to them, two rooms, the upper part of which is divided into a sofa; in the four corners falls of water from the very roof, from shell to shell, of white marble, to the lower end of the room, where it falls into a large basin, surrounded with pipes, that throw up the water as high as the room. The walls are in the nature of lattices; and, on the outside of them, vines and woodbines planted, that form a sort of green tapestry, and give an agreeable obscurity to these delightful chambers. […]
The garden is suitable to the house, where arbours, fountains, and walks; are thrown together in an agreeable confusion. There is no ornament wanting, except that of statues. Thus, you see, sir, these people are not so unpolished as we represent them. ’Tis true their magnificence is of a different taste from ours, and perhaps of a better. I am almost of opinion they have a right notion of life; while they consume it in music, gardens, wine and delicate eating, while we are tormenting our brains with some scheme of politics, or studying some science to which we can never attain. […] We die or grow old and decrepid before we can reap the fruit of our labours. Considering what short‐lived weak animals men are, is there any study so beneficial as the study of present pleasure? I dare not pursue this theme; perhaps I have already said too much … But I allow you to laugh at me for the sensual declaration that I had rather be a rich effendi with all his ignorance, than Sir Isaac Newton with all his knowledge.
I am sir, &c.
IIA4 Charles‐Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) from Persian Letters
Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of Laws), first published anonymously in Geneva in 1748, is one of the foundational documents of the European Enlightenment. Previously, in 1721, Montesquieu had given a new twist to the genre of the epistolary novel so that he could air many of his key themes (such as a need for openness in philosophical and scientific enquiry and the impact of environment on human character) in fictional form, so as to avoid censure by forces of the absolutist state and the church. His Persian Letters used the device of seeing a culture through the eyes of strangers in order to cast a new light on its habits, preoccupations and blind spots. His protagonists, the Persian travellers Usbek and Rica are in Paris on a quest to broaden their horizons during the relatively liberal period of the Regency, which followed the death of Louis XIV in 1715. During the course of the novel, Usbek and Rica experience tension between their own inherited cultural values and the European Enlightenment values they encounter, but particularly early on, they can only describe the external forms of various matters which seem opaque to them. In Letter 34, Usbek writes to a friend in Venice about a series of strange disputes he has encountered among intellectuals. Montesquieu’s point here is to call attention to the ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns’, a long‐running dispute spanning the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries about the relative importance of classical antiquity and modernity. (For a selection of texts, see Art in Theory 1648–1815, Section IA passim) In the letter, Usbek is puzzled by the intensity of the academic conflict over what to an outsider looks like a trivial matter; however, he notes that despite the apparently inconsequential nature of the work involved, a living can be made from it. A more recent manifestation can be found in disputes about the boundaries of the modern and the contemporary. Our extract is from Letter 34 of Persian Letters, translated by Margaret Mauldon with an introduction and notes by Andrew Kahn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 46–7.
Coffee is widely drunk in Paris: there are a great many public establishments where it is served. In some of these establishments news is disseminated; in others, people play chess: there is one place where coffee is prepared in such a manner as to sharpen the wits of those who drink it; at any rate, of those who emerge from there, not a single one fails to be convinced that he is four times cleverer than he was upon entering.
But what shocks me about these wits is that they give no service to their country, but fritter away their talents on childish things; for instance, when I arrived in Paris I found them all worked up over the most trivial dispute one could imagine: it concerned the reputation of an ancient Greek poet, whose land of birth and year of death have remained a matter of conjecture for two thousand years. Both sides admitted that he was an excellent poet: it was simply a question of the degree of excellence to be attributed to him. Everyone believed his own estimate the best, but among these bestowers of reputation, some thought the poet better than did others; that was the quarrel. It was very heated, for the two parties exchanged, with great cordiality, such crude insults and acidulous witticisms that I found the style of the dispute no less amazing than its subject. If anyone, I thought to myself, were foolish enough to appear before one of these defenders of the Greek poet and attack the reputation of some worthy citizen, he would undoubtedly be challenged; and I believe that this touchy fervour over the reputation of the dead would be kindled into a real conflagration in defence of the living; be that as it may, I added, may God protect me from ever drawing upon myself the enmity of these critics of a poet whom two thousand years in the tomb have been unable to defend against such implacable hatred: at the moment they beat the air, but what would happen if their fury were fuelled by the presence of an enemy?
Those whom I have just described to you argue in the vernacular, and one should not confuse them with certain
