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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Section 2 Member 1, Subsection 1 Love Melancholy: Its Ancestry, Power and Reach.

Lucian presents Jupiter complaining that Cupid would give him no peace, and the Moon lamenting how helplessly infatuated she was with Endymion. Even Venus herself confesses how badly her own son Cupid treated her, his mother: “Now dragging her to Mount Ida for love of the Trojan Anchises, now to Lebanon for the sake of that Assyrian youth. Although she threatened to break his bow and arrows and clip his wings, and even whipped his bare buttocks with her slipper, none of it worked: he was too headstrong and unruly.”

That conqueror of monsters, Hercules, was tamed by him:

The man whom a thousand beasts, the son of Sthenelus, And Juno could not conquer, Love conquered.

The man whom neither beasts nor enemies could tame, Nor Juno’s might subdue, was overcome by Love.

Your bravest soldiers and noblest spirits are weakened by it, “when they surrender to women’s blandishments and are defiled by their embraces.” Apollo, who undertook to cure every disease, could not cure himself of this one. Socrates therefore calls Love a tyrant and depicts him riding in triumph in a chariot. Petrarch imitates him in his Triumph of Love, and Fracastoro develops the picture in an elegant poem: Cupid rides, Mars and Apollo follow his chariot, Psyche weeps, and so forth.

Love’s sovereignty over plants can be demonstrated by many compelling proofs and familiar examples, especially palm trees. These are male and female, and display not merely a sympathetic affinity but a passion of love, confirmed by many observations.

The leaves live for love; every fruitful tree Loves in return. Palms nod their mutual pledges; Poplar sighs at poplar’s touch, Plane whispers to plane, and alder to alder.

Constantine, in On Agriculture, book 10, chapter 4, gives an example from Florentius’s Georgics of a palm tree that loved most ardently, “and would not be comforted until her beloved drew close to her. You could see the two trees bend and voluntarily stretch out their branches to embrace and kiss one another. They give unmistakable signs of mutual love.”

Ammianus Marcellinus, book 24, reports that they marry one another and fall in love if they grow within sight; when the wind carries their scent to one another, they are wonderfully moved. Philostratus, in his Images, observes the same, as does Galen in On the Affected Parts, book 6, chapter 5. They fall sick for love, ready to die and waste away. Farmers, noticing this, says Constantine, “stroke several palms growing together, and then stroke the lovesick palm in turn, carrying kisses from one to the other.”

Or they tie the leaves and branches of one to the trunk of the other, making both flourish and prosper much better. “They can tell which are in love by the bending of their branches and the leaning of their trunks.”

If anyone thinks what I say is a fable, let him read the story of two palm trees in Italy, the male growing at Brindisi and the female at Otranto. Giovanni Pontano relates it in an excellent poem; he was once tutor to the younger Alfonso, king of Naples, his secretary of state, and a great philosopher. The trees “were barren, and remained so for a long time,” until, growing taller, they came within sight of one another, although many stadia apart.

Pierio Valeriano, in his Hieroglyphics, and Melchior Guilandinus, in the third section of his treatise On Papyrus, cite Pontano’s story as true. See further Salmuth’s commentary on Panciroli’s New Discoveries, title 1, “On the New World”; Mizaldus’s Secrets, book 2; and Sandys’s Travels, book 2, page 103, and so forth.

If there is such frenzy in plants, what are we to think of sentient creatures? How much more violent and evident must it be in them!

Every race on earth, of humans and wild beasts, The creatures of the sea, the herds and brightly coloured birds, Rush into frenzy and fire: love is the same for all.

All kinds of creatures on the earth, And fishes in the sea, And brightly coloured birds rage alike: This love rules all equally.

This god subdues both the lands and the deep seas.

Common experience and our senses show us how violently animals are carried away by this passion, horses above all—

The frenzy of mares is extraordinary.

In Lucian, Cupid tells his mother Venus to be cheerful: he has now become familiar with lions, often climbs on their backs, holds them by the mane and rides them about like horses, while they fawn on him with their tails.

Bulls, bears and boars are so furious in this passion that they kill one another; especially cocks, lions and stags. The stags are so fierce that you can hear them fight half a mile away, says Turbervile. Often they kill each other or force their rivals to abandon the rut, so that they may remain masters in their place. “When one has driven his rival away, he raises his nose into the air and looks upwards as though thanking nature,” which affords him such great delight.

How birds are affected in this way appears in Aristotle: he maintains that they sing “in anticipation of mating,” from joy or hope of the sexual pleasure to come.

First the birds of the air proclaim you, goddess, And your arrival, their hearts struck by your power.

“Fish waste away for love and grow thin,” if we may accept Gomesius’s authority; some of them are sexually ravenous too. Pierre Gilles, in his History of Animals, book 10, tells wonders of a Triton in Epirus. There was a well near the shore where country girls fetched water. These Tritons would attack them “for the purpose of sexual violation,” carry them into the sea and drown them if they would not submit. So love tyrannizes over creatures without speech.

8591.Compare Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods, especially Aphrodite and Selene, numbered 19 (11) in the consulted text. The Moon is Selene; Endymion is her beloved. The Assyrian youth is Adonis. Pantophle means slipper. Burton’s Latin marginal quotations and English paraphrase are recorded separately.

8592.Ovid, Heroides 9.25–26. The Stheneleian enemy is Eurystheus, son of Sthenelus, who imposed Hercules’s labours. Burton prints Nec and vicit where the consulted text has non and vincit. His separate English couplet generalizes the named enemy, and is retained after the new translation of the Latin.

8596.Enervated means weakened or deprived of vigour. The Latin’s disparaging account of women’s embraces belongs to Burton’s quotation. The herbal maxim is Apollo’s admission in Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.523. Petrarch’s Triumph of Love and Fracastoro’s poem are invoked as triumphal processions in which the god conquers other gods. Their exact passages and the Altopilius reference remain for collation.

8597.Pregnant proofs means compelling or abundant evidence. Sympathy here is an affinity between natural things, while love-passion gives the relation a human emotional character. The passage presents early modern natural philosophy through reported observations and inherited stories.

8599.Claudian, Epithalamium on the marriage of Honorius and Maria 65–68, in the description of Venus’s dwelling. Burton’s text differs from the consulted Latin, including nutant & mutua and Et Platano Platanus. The modern version follows his printed wording and keeps the four-line form.

8601.Geoponica 10.4, associated with Constantine VII, cites Florentinus for a female palm’s longing for a male. Owen’s English translation describes relief through contact and transfer of the male’s flower. Burton gives both palms feminine pronouns; his Latin margin prints dejectus, dejected. These forms remain. The Greek and Latin intermediary have not been collated.

8603.Compare Ammianus Marcellinus 24.3.12–13, which reports male and female palms, fertilization and apparent mutual desire. Husbandmen means cultivators or farmers. Burton combines this with other authorities and a description of transferring contact between palms. The Galen and Philostratus locators remain to be checked against their full texts.

8605.Brundusium is Brindisi; the male and female trees are said to stand far apart at Brindisi and Otranto. Stadia is the plural of an ancient unit of distance. Burton’s attribution of the story to Pontano is retained without endorsing its botanical claim. A printed superscript i before which were barren has no separate recoverable marginal text on this scan; the literal marker is retained in the original column.

8606.This is a chain of literary authorities rather than an independent verification of the story. Pierius is Pierio Valeriano; Sands is George Sandys. The abbreviated titles and locators are reproduced, with recognizable titles expanded in the modern text; edition-specific page references remain unverified.

8608.Virgil, Georgics 3.242–244. Burton prints ferarum without the second -que of the consulted text. The three Latin lines are followed by Burton’s separate four-line English rendering; both remain in the edition. Painted means brightly coloured.

8610.Propertius, Elegies 2.26.52. In its original context the line immediately follows Boreas and his abduction of Orithyia. Burton applies its assertion of dominion over land and sea to Love.

8611.Virgil, Georgics 3.266, on the sexual frenzy of mares. The fragment’s equarum is specifically female horses, though Burton’s prose says horses generally. Only the quoted fragment is supplied.

8613.Compare Lucian, Dialogues of the Gods, Aphrodite and Eros, numbered 20 (12) in the consulted text. Cupid boasts that he can ride lions. The consulted translation also describes putting a hand into their mouths; Burton’s wording about their tails is retained in both body and margin.

8616.Harts are adult male deer; rut is their mating season; corrivall means rival. The hunting-book reference is transmitted under Turbervile’s name. The final gesture is interpreted as gratitude to nature by the quoted writer, not established as the animal’s conscious intention.

8617.Venery here means sexual activity or mating. Burton attributes the explanation of birdsong to Aristotle without a precise passage; the attribution is retained pending collation.

8619.Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 1.12–13, from the opening invocation to Venus. Initum means arrival or advent here; the lines describe the coming of the goddess and spring. Burton’s accompanying account applies the poem to animal desire.

8622.Gomesius is the author cited under the Latin title On Salt; Peter Gellius is Pierre Gilles. A Triton is a sea-being of classical mythology. Stupri causâ and the drowning threat describe sexual coercion, not courtship. Burton reports the story as an example of desire’s tyranny; its specific textual transmission remains unresolved.