“Sometimes I’ll read a whole history without paying the slightest occasion to the blows exchanged in battle or the thickness of the walls of towns that have been seized. Alert only to the habits of men, I take pleasure in watching that long parade of passions and fantasies.
“In the history of jealousy, it may be seen that men are not always governed by nature and reason, but rather by pure chance, and that certain circumstances that do not seem important in themselves may have such an influence on men, and drive them on with so much force and constancy, that they can twist man’s entire nature.
“When Darius had made a law that prohibited adultery, the Massagetai informed him that they could hardly obey it because they had a custom of lending out their wives to their guests. Whatever force that custom may have had, it’s certain that a Massagete who loved his wife and prostituted her to a stranger would have been rather troubled if his wife had ended up loving this stranger more than him; he would have been happy to fulfill an exterior duty, but he would doubtless have wished his wife to restrain herself to what civility required and to preserve for him a heart that he held dear. The inhabitants of that country were so honourable (honnête) that they wanted to demonstrate to guests that they would give to them that which they loved the best, and this very fact should make us think that a man would have been rather troubled to lose for all time the love of a woman that he had only given up for a moment.
“For certain prejudices to become general, and for these prejudices to lend their tone to the rest of social life, it has been necessary for large societies to form.
“There were two peoples who fought for the title of oldest, the Egyptians and the Scythians. Isis and Osiris ruled among the Egyptians; they were placed among the gods; Isis had preeminence over her husband, and, in her, her whole sex found respect. In her honor, the Egyptians submitted themselves to their wives, and they bent themselves so much to this servitude that, taking care of the housework, they left all business outside the household to their wives. They succeeded to the kingship alongside their brothers, etc.
“As for the Scythians, history teaches us that certain of their women slew their husbands. Calling marriage a servitude rather than an alliance, they founded the empire of the Amazons, built Ephesus, and conquered almost the whole of Asia.
“The prejudices of nations have the same prejudices as empires [sic]. It takes hardly any effort at all to give one people the prejudices of another, and the progress of this process can be so great that it transforms, so to speak, the entire spirit of human nature. This is what makes man so hard to define.
“Isn’t it true that, if Islam had conquered the whole world, women would be shut indoors everywhere? This way of governing them would be regarded as natural, and we would have trouble imagining that there could be another. If the women of Scythia had continued their conquests, if the Egyptians had continued theirs, mankind would live in servitude to women, and one would have to be a philosopher to say that another kind of government was more in conformity with nature.”