It is a sport to see Socrates, after his blunt manner, to mock Hipias, who reporteth unto him what great sums of money he had gained, especially in certain little cities and small towns of Sicily, by keeping school and teaching letters, and that at Sparta he could not get a shilling. That they were but idiots and foolish people, who can neither measure nor esteem; nor make an account of grammar or of rhythms; and who only amuse themselves to know the succession of kings, the establishing and declination of estates, and suchlike trash of flim-flam tales. Which done, Socrates forcing him particularly to allow the excellency of their public government, the happiness and virtue of their private life, remits onto him to guess the conclusion of the unprofitableness of his arts. Examples teach us both in this martial policy, and in all suchlike, that the study of sciences doth more weaken and effeminate men’s minds than corroborate and adapt them to war. The mightiest, yea the best settled estate that is now in the world is that of the Turks, a nation equally instructed to the esteem of arms and disesteem of letters. I find Rome to have been most valiant when it was least learned. The most warlike nations of our days are the rudest and most ignorant. The Scythians, the Parthians, and Tamburlane serve to verify my saying. When the Goths overran and ravaged Greece, that which saved all their libraries from the fire was that one among them scattered this opinion, that such trash of books and papers must be left untouched and whole for their enemies, as the only mean and proper instrument to divert them from all military exercises, and amuse them to idle, secure, and sedentary occupations.

From Montaigne’s Essays, translated by J. Florio, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005, pp. 22-34.