A very very belated footnote to Jodi’s series of posts on cruelty. This is from Montaigne’s essay on the subject:
I live in a season when unbelievable examples of this vice of cruelty flourish because of the licence of our civil wars; you can find nothing in ancient history more extreme than what we witness every day. [..] If o had not seen it I could hardly have made myself believe that you could find souls so monstrous that they would commit murder for the sheer fun of it; would hack at another man’s limbs and would lop them off and would cudgel their brains to invent unusual tortures and new forms of murder, not from hatred or for gain but for the sole purpose of enjoying the pleasant spectacle of the pitiful gestures and twitchings of a man dying in agony, while hearing his screams and groans. For there you have the farthest point that cruelty can reach: ‘Ut homo hominem, non iratus, mon timens, tantum spectaturus occident’ [That man should kill man not in anger or in fear but merely for the spectacle’]
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