The gleam of bronze, and echoing halls bright with flashing Gold, shining electrum, carved ivory, And silver too. Such is Jove’s lofty dwelling: The gods’ starry palace shines on Olympus.

Such glittering gold and shining brass, Clear amber, pure silver, and fine ivory: Jupiter’s lofty palace, where the gods dwell, Was just like this, and did not surpass it.

It will “relax the mind,” refresh the human soul, to see finely built cities, streets, theatres, temples, obelisks, and the like. The Temple in Jerusalem was so beautifully built of white marble, with so many gold-covered pyramids—“and the temple’s roof, flashing with yellow gold, blinded travellers’ eyes with its overpowering brilliance”—that it was glorious and glittered so brightly from afar that spectators could scarcely bear to look at it. Its interior was all so elaborately adorned with cedar, gold, jewels, and so forth, as the poet said of Cleopatra’s palace in Egypt:

… And thick gold had hidden the beams.

So that the beholders were astonished. What is so pleasant as seeing a pageant or procession go by, as at coronations, weddings, and similar ceremonies, or seeing an ambassador or prince welcomed, received, and entertained with masques, shows, fireworks, and so forth?

To see two kings fight in single combat, like Porus and Alexander, Cnut and Edmund Ironside, or Skanderbeg and Ferat Pasha the Turk, when not honour alone but life itself is at stake, as the poet says of Hector:

… For the contest was not for a bull’s hide, Nor for an ox, the customary prizes of a race, But for great Hector’s very life and soul.

To watch a battle fought like Crécy, Agincourt, or Poitiers, “than which I do not know,” says Froissart, “whether antiquity can produce any more famous.” To see one of Caesar’s triumphs in ancient Rome revived, or something similar.

To attend a meeting of sovereigns, like the famous meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I, celebrated throughout Europe, “where the two kings and their wives met with such magnificent preparations,” says Hubertus Vellius, “and such triumphant splendour that no age had ever seen or heard of such celebrated festivities”: no age ever saw the like.

Such shows are so immensely enjoyable that people will often come hundreds of miles to see them, pay any price for a place, and remember them many years later with exceptional delight. Bodin, when he was an ambassador in England, said that he saw the noblemen going in their robes to Parliament: “we saw it with the greatest pleasure.” The sight moved him deeply.

Pompeo Colonna, says Giovio in his life of him, once saw thirteen Frenchmen and as many Italians fight on behalf of a whole army: “he calls it the most delightful spectacle of his life,” the pleasantest sight he had ever seen. Who would not have been moved by such a spectacle?

Or the single combat between Breute the Frenchman and Anthony Schets, a Netherlander, before the walls of ’s-Hertogenbosch in Brabant in 1600. There were twenty-two horsemen on each side, who, like Livy’s Horatii, Torquati, and Corvini, fought for their own glory and their country’s honour in full view of their city and army.

When Julius Caesar was campaigning along the banks of the Rhine, a barbarian prince came to see him and the Roman army. After gazing at Caesar for a long time, he said, “Now I see the gods of whom I had only heard before; nor have I ever hoped for or experienced a happier day in my life.” It was the happiest day he had ever known. Such a sight alone could drive away melancholy; if not for ever, it must at least dispel it for a time.

Radziwiłł was much taken with the pasha’s palace in Cairo and, among the many other sights the place offered, with Ibrahim Pasha’s ceremony of cutting the banks of the Nile when it flooded. Besides two or three hundred gilded galleys on the water, he saw two million men gathered on land with turbans as white as snow. It was a splendid sight.

Even reading about feasts, triumphs, royal meetings, weddings, jousts, tournaments, combats, and single duels is most welcome and enjoyable. Franciscus Modius has made a large collection of such ceremonies in two great volumes, which anyone who wishes may read.

Simply looking at those elaborate plans and depictions of temples and palaces—the Lateran church in Albrecht Dürer; the Temple in Jerusalem in Josephus, Adrichomius, and Villalpando; the Escorial in Guadas; the Temple of Diana at Ephesus in Pliny; Nero’s Golden Palace in Rome; Justinian’s in Constantinople; the Peruvian Inca’s in Cusco, “so that it seems to have been built by demons, not by human beings”; St Mark’s in Venice, as described by Ignatius; and many others—

“the works of ancient craftsmen,” as that translator of Pausanias says, the extraordinary workmanship of the ancient Greeks in theatres, obelisks, temples, statues, and images of gold, silver, ivory, and marble, “fill the mind with almost as much delight when read about as when seen”: they move us almost as much through reading as through sight.

The countryside has its recreations, and the city its various sports and exercises, May festivities, feasts, wakes, and cheerful gatherings for enjoyment. Simply being in the country, living that life and enjoying its pleasures as the ancient patriarchs did, is recreation enough for some people. The emperor Diocletian was so fond of it that he gave up his sceptre and became a gardener. Constantine wrote twenty books on agriculture. When ambassadors came to see Lysander, he boasted of nothing more than his orchard: “these are my rows.” What shall I say of Cincinnatus, Cato, Cicero, and many others? How they delighted in pruning, planting, budding, and grafting, and in displaying so many kinds of pears, apples, plums, peaches, and so forth!