SECTION 2 MEMBER 1, SUBSECTION 1 Love melancholy: its ancestry, power and reach.

In the preceding section, among other pleasing objects, we mentioned the grace and beauty of women that causes “heroical,” or love, melancholy. It stands above the other kinds and is properly called Love. The part affected in men is the liver. It is called “heroical” because gallants, noblemen and the noblest spirits are commonly possessed by it.

Its power and reach are very great. In that twofold division of love into “affection” and “erotic desire”—those two Venuses mentioned by Plato and others—it is the foremost, called Venus “in the pre-eminent sense,” as I have said, or Love itself. Although named with reference to human beings, and most evident in them, it extends to plants, sentient creatures and those incorporeal beings to be described below, exercising a wide dominion over them.

Love’s ancestry is very ancient, reaching back to the beginning of the world, as Phaedrus argues. His parentage is so old that no poet could ever discover it. Hesiod makes Earth and Chaos Love’s parents, before the gods were born:

Before all the gods, she first brought forth Love.

Some think Love is the very fire Prometheus brought from heaven. Plutarch, in his little work on love, makes Love the son of Iris and the West Wind. But Socrates, in that delightful dialogue of Plato, when his turn came to speak about love—a subject just introduced by Agathon the rhetorician, “grandiloquent Agathon,” that singer Agathon—tells this tale in a poetic vein:

When Venus was born, all the gods were invited to a banquet, among them Porus, the god of abundance and wealth. Penia, or Poverty, came begging at the door. Porus, thoroughly drunk on nectar—for there was no wine in those days—was walking in Jupiter’s garden when he met Penia in a bower. In his drunkenness he made her pregnant, and she gave birth to Love. Because he was conceived on Venus’s birthday, Venus always attends upon him. Ficino gives the moral interpretation of this story.

Another tale there is borrowed from Aristophanes. At the beginning of the world, human beings had four arms and four feet. But because they proudly compared themselves with the gods, they were divided into halves; now, perhaps, they hope through love to be reunited and made one.

Or the story runs this way: Vulcan met two lovers and told them to ask for whatever they wished, and they would have it. They answered, “O Vulcan, smith of the gods,” and so on: “O Vulcan, the gods’ great smith, we beg you to forge us anew in your furnace and make us one instead of two.” He immediately did so; ever since, true lovers are either wholly one or desire to be united. You will find many such tales, with their moral interpretations, in the third dialogue of Leone Ebreo.

The reason Love was always portrayed as young, according to Phornutus and others, “is that young people are most disposed to love; soft, beautiful and plump, because such people are most readily captivated; naked, because all true affection is simple and open. He smiles because he is merry and given to pleasure; he carries a quiver to show his power, which no one can escape; and he is blind because he does not see where he strikes or whom he hits,” and so on.

The poets express his power and sovereignty by holding him to be a god, a mighty commanding god above Jupiter himself: “a great spirit,” as Plato calls him; the strongest and merriest of all the gods, according to Alcinous and Athenaeus. “Love is king of men; Love is king of gods too,” says Euripides: god of gods and governor of humanity. We must all pay him homage, keep a holy day for his divinity, adore him in his temples, worship his image—“for this divinity is no mere name”—and sacrifice at his altar: he conquers and rules everyone.

I would rather wrestle with a lion, a stag and the Aeolian boar, With Antaeus and the Stymphalian birds, Than with Love—

I would rather fight bulls, lions, bears and giants than Love. So powerful is he that he compels everyone to pay him tribute, lords it over all, and makes whomever he pleases mad or sane. Indeed, Caecilius, in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, considers anyone who does not acknowledge Love as a great god no better than a fool or an idiot.

In whose hands it lies to choose whom he would drive mad, Whom make wise, whom cast into sickness, and so on.

He can make sick or cure whomever he pleases. Homer and Stesichorus were both struck blind, if you believe Leone Ebreo, for speaking against his divinity.

And although Aristophanes degrades him, saying that he was contemptuously expelled from the council of the gods, his wings clipped so that he could no longer come among them, and, to disgrace him further, banished from heaven for ever and confined to earth, still his power, majesty, omnipotence and dominion are such that no creature can resist him.

Cupid commands even the gods as he pleases, And mighty Jupiter himself cannot restrain him.

He is more than an equal partner of the gods—

He holds The sea through Thetis, the shades through Aeacus, heaven through Jove.

He has not merely possession but dominion. Jupiter himself was transformed for love into a satyr, a shepherd, a bull, a swan, a shower of gold and every imaginable thing. As Lucian’s Juno quite rightly reproached him, “you are Love’s plaything”—you are Cupid’s whirligig. How he lorded it over all the other gods: Mars, Neptune, Pan, Mercury, Bacchus and the rest!