At times I laughed and scoffed with Lucian, exposed faults through satire with Menippus, or lamented with Heraclitus. At other times I was “a scoffer with a mischievous spleen”; then again, “bile burned my liver.” I was deeply stirred by abuses I could not remedy.

However much I may share those feelings with him or with them, that is not why I conceal myself beneath his name. I do it either to gain a little more liberty and freedom of speech under an unfamiliar disguise, or, if you insist on knowing, for the single reason Hippocrates describes at length in his letter to Damegetus. He relates that, visiting Democritus one day, he found him in his garden on the outskirts of Abdera, beneath a shady bower, with a book on his knees, absorbed in study, sometimes writing, sometimes walking.

His book concerned melancholy and madness. Around him lay the carcasses of many different animals, which he had recently cut open and dissected. As he told Hippocrates, this was not from contempt for God's creatures, but to discover the seat of this “black bile,” or melancholy: where it came from and how it was generated in human bodies. He intended thereby to cure it more effectively in himself and, through his writings and observations, teach others how to prevent and avoid it.

Hippocrates warmly praised this good intention. Democritus Junior therefore ventures to imitate him and, since he left the work unfinished and it is now lost, to revive, pursue, and complete it in this treatise, “as Democritus's stand-in.”

You have heard my reason for the name. If the title and its wording offend your sense of seriousness, I could produce many sober treatises—even sermons—with more fanciful names on their title pages, if pointing to others were a sufficient defence. In any case, these days a fanciful title is a way of helping a book sell.

For, as larks descend into a net set by day, many frivolous readers will stop and stare, like foolish passers-by, at a grotesque picture in a painter's shop, though they will not look at a work of sound judgement. Indeed, as Scaliger observes, nothing attracts a reader more than an unexpected, unthought-of subject, and nothing sells better than a scurrilous pamphlet, “especially when novelty excites the palate.”

Many writers, Gellius says, are very ingenious in devising titles, which can—as Pliny quotes from Seneca—make a man dawdle on his way to fetch a midwife for his daughter, who is about to give birth. For my part, I have honourable precedents for what I have done. One will stand for them all: Bishop Antonio Zara's Anatomy of Wit, divided into four sections, members, subsections, and so on, available to read in our libraries.

If anyone objects to my subject, or to the way I treat it, and demands a reason, I can give more than one. I write about melancholy to avoid melancholy by keeping busy. Nothing causes melancholy more than idleness, and nothing cures it better than activity, as Rhazes maintains.

And although “labour spent on trifles is foolish”—occupying oneself with trivial things serves little purpose—listen to the divine Seneca: better “to do something else than nothing,” better to do something without purpose than nothing at all. So I wrote and kept myself occupied in this playful labour, “with an idle diligence, to escape the torpor of doing nothing,” like Vettius in Macrobius, “and to turn leisure into useful work.” To say things both pleasant and useful for life, delighting the reader while offering instruction.

For this purpose I write, like those who, Lucian says, recite to trees and deliver speeches to pillars for want of listeners. As Paul of Aegina frankly admits, it is not because anything was unknown or left out, but to exercise myself. If certain people followed that course, I think it would be good for their bodies and much better for their souls. Or perhaps I write, as others do, for fame, to display myself: “Your knowledge counts for nothing unless someone else knows that you know it.”

I might share Thucydides' opinion that knowing something without expressing it is as good as not knowing it. When I first took up this task, “and, as that writer says, undertook the work at the prompting of my genius,” this was my aim: “at least to soothe my mind by writing,” to ease my mind through writing. For I had “a burdened heart, a pregnant head,” a kind of abscess in my head that I very much wanted to discharge, and I could imagine no better way to empty it than this.