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Subsection 6. Shame and Disgrace as Causes.

Subsection 6. Shame and disgrace as causes.

Shame and disgrace cause the most violent emotions and bitter pangs. “Noble minds are often disturbed by shame and public dishonour, by some fault they have committed”—Felix Platter, On Mental Alienation, book 3. Noble minds are often driven by shame to despair over some public disgrace. And whoever submits himself to fear, grief, ambition and shame, says Philo in On the Providence of God, book 2, is not happy but utterly miserable, tormented by continual toil, care and suffering.

It strikes as hard as any of the other passions. Many people disregard the world’s commotions and care nothing for glory, yet fear infamy, rejection and disgrace—Cicero, On Duties, book 1. They can sternly despise pleasure and bear grief with indifference, yet reproach and slander batter and break them completely, “since life and reputation walk hand in hand.” Often they are so cast down by some public injury or disgrace—a slap on the ear from someone beneath them, defeat by an adversary, a reverse in battle, losing their way in a speech, some foul deed committed or exposed, and so on—that for the rest of their lives they dare not go out, but brood in corners and hide in holes.

The noblest spirits are most subject to it: “It breaks lofty and noble spirits,” says Jerome. Aristotle drowned himself from grief and shame because he could not understand the currents of the Euripus: Caelius Rhodiginus, Ancient Readings, book 29, chapter 8. “Homer was consumed by shame”: this passion swallowed him up because he could not solve the fisherman’s riddle. Sophocles killed himself because one of his tragedies was hissed off the stage: Valerius Maximus, book 9, chapter 12.

Lucretia stabbed herself, and Cleopatra did the same when she saw that she was being kept for a triumph, to escape the dishonour. After his defeat by the enemy, Mark Antony sat alone for three days in the bow of his ship, avoiding all company, even Cleopatra’s; afterwards he butchered himself from sheer shame, Plutarch, Life of Antony. Apollonius of Rhodes voluntarily went into exile, abandoning his country and all his dear friends because he faltered while reciting his poems, Pliny, book 7, chapter 23. Ajax went mad because his arms were awarded to Ulysses.

In China it is common for those rejected in their celebrated examinations, or candidates for degrees, to lose their minds from shame and grief: Matteo Ricci, Expedition to China, book 3, chapter 9. The friar Hoogstraten took so deeply to heart the book Reuchlin had written against him, entitled Letters of Obscure Men, that shame and grief drove him to kill himself: Giovio, Eulogies.

A grave and learned minister, a regular preacher at Alkmaar in Holland, was one day walking in the fields for recreation when he was suddenly seized with diarrhoea and forced to withdraw to the nearest ditch. Caught unawares by some gentlewomen of his parish who were walking that way, he was so ashamed that he never again appeared in public or entered the pulpit, but wasted away with melancholy: Pieter van Foreest, Medical Observations, book 10, observation 12. Thus shame, too, can show its strength among the passions.

I know there are many base, shameless, brazen-faced rogues who will “turn pale at no wrongdoing,” who are moved by nothing, take no infamy or disgrace to heart and laugh at everything. Let them be proved perjurers, marked and convicted as rogues, thieves and traitors; let their ears be cut off, let them be whipped, branded, paraded in a cart, pointed at, hissed at, abused and mocked like Ballio the pimp in Plautus: they enjoy it. “Fine singers!” “Ha!” and “Bravo!”—what do they care? We have too many such people in our own times.

Melicertes cries out that all sense of shame Has vanished from the world.

Yet a modest man, one with a sense of decency, a noble spirit sensitive about his reputation, will be deeply wounded and so grievously affected that he would rather give away tens of thousands of crowns, or lose his life, than suffer the slightest stain on his honour or blemish on his good name. If he cannot avoid it, then, like a nightingale “that dies when defeated in song,” as Mizaldus says—dies of shame if another bird sings better—he languishes and wastes away in anguish of spirit.

2875.“Generous” means noble in disposition or birth, rather than willing to give. The Latin from Platter is translated before Burton’s separate English expansion, which adds despair. Philo’s reference is retained in its printed form; the precise source needs collation.

2878.“Repulse” is rejection or rebuff; “to be out” in a speech is to lose one’s words; a “fact” is a deed. Burton connects social humiliation with withdrawal from public life. His English says people can bear grief indifferently, whereas the marginal Latin says they are less firm under pain; the difference is retained.

2881.These are received exemplary stories, not established biographies. Euripus is the strait beside Euboea, famous for its changing currents. Valerius Maximus 9.12, external examples 3 and 5, reports Homer’s fatal grief over the riddle, but says Sophocles died from joy after a theatrical victory. It does not support Burton’s account of Sophocles’s suicide after failure; that account and its marginal note are retained as a textual discrepancy.

2885.A triumph could display defeated rulers as captives. Plutarch, Antony 67.4, records the three days at the prow; 76–77 places Antony’s suicide later at Alexandria, following a false report of Cleopatra’s death. In 86.1–3 Plutarch gives alternative accounts of her death and admits uncertainty; he does not support Burton’s grouping of her with Lucretia’s stabbing. “His armes” for Ajax is retained although the contest concerned Achilles’s armour. The Apollonius story is not supplied by Pliny 7.23 (§87) in the consulted numbering; Burton’s edition or intermediary remains unidentified.

2888.Burton cites the account of China associated with Matteo Ricci for distress following examination failure. Hostratus is Jakob van Hoogstraten. Giovio’s eulogy of Reuchlin does ascribe the Letters of Obscure Men to Reuchlin’s circle and reports Hoogstraten’s death from chagrin and anger, but the consulted translation does not explicitly say suicide. Modern attribution gives the principal authorship to Crotus Rubianus and Ulrich von Hutten (C. G. Nauert, New Catholic Encyclopedia). Burton’s stronger claim is retained as a claim, with Latin-source collation pending.

2890.Alcmar is Alkmaar. A “lask” is diarrhoea; “ordinary” here means regular. “Play his prize” is a figurative display of skill or power. The marginal note adds fear of an accusation of a base offence, beyond the embarrassment described in the body. Foreest’s exact case remains for collation.

2893.Burton lists punishments and public humiliations meant to produce shame. “Carted” means paraded publicly in a cart. Ballio is the shameless pimp in Plautus’s Pseudolus. His approving interjections turn abuse into applause; the long author’s note preserves Burton’s comic exchange. The printed babe is retained on the original side. The full exchange has not been directly collated with the play, and the Horace phrase remains unidentified.

2894.Persius, Satire 5.103–4. Melicertes is invoked as a sea deity in a passage about an unqualified person claiming command of a ship. Burton adapts Persius’s exclamet (“would cry out”) to exclamat (“cries out”); frons, literally the forehead, signifies modesty or a capacity for shame.

2896.“Crowns” are coins, used here for an immense sum. The defeated nightingale is a reported natural-history example, cited through Antoine Mizauld from Pliny, not an observation established by this edition. “Grace” here includes a sense of decency. The subsection closes by contrasting shamelessness with extreme sensitivity to reputation.