Subsection 7. A collection of other events that cause melancholy: the death of friends, losses, and so on.

In this labyrinth of incidental causes, the farther I wander, the more intricate I find the passage: “many windings”; and new causes, like so many side paths, offer themselves for discussion. To explore them all would be a Herculean task, fitter for Theseus. I shall follow my intended thread and point out only a few of the chief ones.

Among these, the loss and death of friends may claim first place. “Many grow sad,” as Vives aptly observes, “after pleasures, banquets and holidays.” Many become melancholy after a feast, holiday, merry gathering or enjoyable pastime if they happen to be alone, left to themselves without occupation or amusement, or without their usual companions. Some, merely at the departure of friends whom they will soon see again, weep and howl and gaze after them, as a cow lows after her calf or a child cries when returning to school after the holidays.

“As your arrival had cheered me, so your departure distressed me,” as Cicero wrote to Atticus: your coming was less welcome to me than your departure was painful.

Montanus, consultation 132, mentions a countrywoman who, on leaving her friends and birthplace, became grievously melancholy for many years; and Alexander of Tralles mentions another whose condition arose from her husband’s absence.

This is a common feeling among our good wives. If a husband stays away a day longer than arranged, or misses his appointed hour, they immediately fall to sighing and weeping: he has either been robbed or is dead; some misfortune or other must surely have befallen him. They cannot eat, drink, sleep or have peace of mind until they see him again.

If friends’ parting—mere absence—can have such violent effects, what will death do, when they must be separated for ever, never to meet again in this world? For the time being this is so grievous a torment that it takes away their appetite and desire to live, extinguishes every pleasure, and causes deep sighs and groans, tears and cries:

(O a mother’s sweet offspring, O my own blood, Alas, still warm … O tender flower.)

Howling, roaring and many bitter pangs—“the halls resound with lamentation, groaning and the wailing of women.” Through constant dwelling on it, grief sometimes goes so far that they think they continually see their dead friends before their eyes, “watching images,” as the Conciliator confesses that he saw his mother’s ghost continually appearing before him.

“What the unhappy long for intensely, they readily believe.” Again, again, again, that good father, that good son, that good wife, that dear friend occupies their thoughts: “the whole mind is fixed on this one thought,” all year long, as Pliny laments to Romanus: I seem to see Verginius, hear Verginius, talk with Verginius, and so on.

Without you, alas for wretched me, the lilies seem black, The roses pale; the hyacinth has no lovely blush, And neither myrtle nor laurel breathes any fragrance.

Even the steadiest and most patient are swept headlong so violently by grief in such a case that men otherwise brave and sensible often forget themselves and weep like children for months together, as though they would dissolve into water, and refuse to be comforted. They are gone, they are gone.

“A black day carried them off and plunged them into an untimely grave.” What shall I do?

Who will give me a fountain for tears? Who will stir Groans deep enough, and words for bitter grief? Filial love drains my eyes and breaks my gaping Breast, nor lets me pour out all the lament I crave: So great a loss weighs upon me, and so on.

Who gives me fountains of tears, who lends me groans, Deep sighs enough to express my sorrow? My eyes are dry, my breast is torn apart; My loss is so great, I cannot mourn enough.

So Strozzi the younger, that elegant Italian poet, bewails his father’s death in his funeral lament. He could moderate his feelings in other matters, as he admits, but not in this: he yields himself wholly to sorrow.

Now, I confess, I turn my back before misfortune; that spirit fails, That once unconquerable strength and firmness of mind.

How Quintilian laments the loss of his son, almost to the point of despair! How Cardano mourns his only child in his book On His Own Books and elsewhere in many of his other writings!

How Saint Ambrose mourns his brother’s death! “Can I fail to think of you, or think of you without tears? O bitter days, O nights of weeping,” and so on. How Gregory of Nazianzus mourns that noble Pulcheria! “O beauty,” and so on; “a fresh flower, just budding,” and so on.

Alexander, a man of utterly indomitable courage, after Hephaestion’s death, as Curtius relates, “lay for three days, determined to die.” He lay on the ground for three days together, resolved to die with him, and would neither eat nor drink nor sleep.

When her son fell down dead, the woman who spoke with Ezra, 2 Esdras, chapter 10, fled into the field and would not return to the city. She resolved to remain there, neither eating nor drinking, but mourning and fasting until she died. “Rachel wept for her children and would not be comforted, because they were no more,” Matthew 2:18.

So the emperor Hadrian bewailed his Antinous; Hercules, Hylas; Orpheus, Eurydice; David, Absalom—“O my dear son Absalom!”—Augustine, his mother Monica; and Niobe, her children, so intensely that the poets imagined her turned to stone, as though numbed by the extremity of grief.

“Aegeus, appalled by the mournful signal of his son, threw himself headlong into the sea.” Unable to endure grief at his son’s death, he drowned himself.

Our recent physicians abound in such examples. Montanus, consultation 242, had a patient troubled by this disorder for many years following her husband’s death. Trincavelli, book 1, consultation 14, has another such patient, almost in despair after his mother’s death, “so that he nearly threw himself headlong,” and ready in his distraction to kill himself.