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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Member 2. Subsection 2. Other Causes of Love Melancholy: Sight; Beauty of The…

God and men, heaven and earth combine to honour him. Everyone pities him more than others if he is in need, and the whole world is willing to help him. Chariclea fell into the hands of pirates, but when all the others were put to the sword, she alone was spared for her beauty. When Constantinople was sacked by the Turk, Irene escaped, and so far from being made a captive, she captivated the Grand Signor himself.

So Rosamond triumphed over King Henry II.

—— I was so fair a sight: The man whom fortune made my king, my love made subject. He learned through experience the privilege of beauty: It had the power to override all duty.

It takes even the gods themselves captive, those more exacting divinities:

—— The very god of gods, For beauty’s sake, became bull, horse, shower and swan.

And those evil spirits are captivated by it, as I have already shown. “Barbarians revere a beautiful woman, and at a beautiful sight a savage spirit grows gentle” (Heliodorus, book 5). Barbarians stand in awe of a beautiful woman, and a fierce spirit is calmed by a lovely face.

For when Troy had fallen and the wars were over, as Clement of Alexandria quotes from Euripides, angry Menelaus, armed with rage and fury, came with his sword drawn to kill Helen with his own hands, since she had been the sole cause of all those wars and miseries. But when he saw her beautiful face, astonished by her divine beauty, he let his weapon fall and even embraced her: he could not bring himself to strike so lovely a creature.

“Thus swords are blunted by beauty”: the edge of a sharp sword, as the saying goes, is dulled by a beautiful face, and severity itself is overcome. When the orator Hyperides’ client Phryne was accused at Athens of lewd behaviour, he used no other defence of her case: he tore her upper garment and exposed her bare breast to the judges. Her bodily beauty and lovely bearing so moved and astonished them that they immediately acquitted her and let her go.

O noble piece of justice, my author exclaims! Who would not rather lose his seat and robes, forfeit his office, than pass sentence against the majesty of beauty? Beautiful people enjoy such privileges, and they alone are free from danger. Parthenopaeus was so lovely and handsome that, when he fought in the Theban wars, if his face happened to be uncovered, no enemy would attempt to strike or hurt him. Such immunity beauty enjoys.

Even beasts are moved by it. Sinalda was a woman of such outstanding beauty, and a queen, that when she was condemned to be trampled by wild horses, “the wild beasts stood admiring her beauty and would not hurt her” (Saxo Grammaticus, History of the Danes, book 8).

Why did that royal maiden in Apuleius, when she fled from the thieves’ den in a wilderness, address the ass on which she rode in this way—for how could she know he was anything but an ass? “If you restore me to my parents and my handsome bridegroom, what thanks shall I give you, what honours shall I pay you, what food shall I offer you?”

She would comb him, groom him, feed him and adorn him herself every day; he should work no more, toil no more, but rest and play, and so forth. Besides, she would have a fine picture painted as a lasting memorial: a maiden riding on an ass’s back, with this inscription, “A royal maiden escaping captivity with an ass as her bearer.” Why did she say all this? Why did she make such promises to a speechless beast?

Because she perceived that the poor ass was captivated by her beauty. For he often “turned his neck to kiss the girl’s lovely feet,” kissing her feet as she rode, “and tried to bray in response to her sweet little words,” attempting, as far as he could, to show his agreement with her tender speech. Besides, he thought he had some fellow feeling for her distress.

And why did Theagenes’ horse in Heliodorus curvet, prance and move so proudly, “leaping eagerly and showing off,” and so forth, unless surely, as my author supposes, it was in love with its master? “Would you not have said that the handsome horse itself understood the beauty of its master’s form?”

A fly landed on Malthus’s cheek as he lay asleep. But why? Not to hurt him, as a hanger-on standing beside him clearly understood: “not to sting him but to kiss him”—certainly to kiss him, enraptured by his divine looks.

Even inanimate things, I suppose, have a touch of this. When a drop from Psyche’s candle fell on Cupid’s shoulder, surely, I think, it was to kiss it. When Venus ran to meet her rosy-cheeked Adonis, as an elegant poet of ours describes her,

——the bushes in her path: Some catch her neck, some kiss her face, Some coil around her legs to make her stay, And all longed to embrace her.

“The very air is infected with love,” as Heliodorus maintains: the air itself is in love. For when Hero played her lute,

The playful air danced in twenty lovely shapes To the movement of her fingers——

and those lustful winds held Daphne back as she fled from Apollo:

——the winds laid bare her body, And the opposing gusts fluttered her clothes against her.

Boreas, the north wind, loved Hyacinthus, and Orithyia, Ericthon’s daughter of Athens: “he carried her off by force,” and so on. He abducted her as she was playing with other girls beside the Ilissus, and fathered his two sons, Zetes and Calais, by her. That seas and waters fall in love with our beauty is every bit as likely as the same claim about the air and winds. For when Leander swam in the Hellespont, Neptune beat down the waves with his trident, but

They kept rising, intending to kiss him, And fell in drops like tears because they missed him.

The river Alpheus was in love with Arethusa, as she tells the story herself:

——and, drying her green hair with her hand, She recounted the river Alpheus’s old love: “I was one of the nymphs,” and so on——

When our Thame and Isis meet,

8972.Chariclea is the heroine of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica. The Irene story is cited to Knolles; “Grand Signor” denotes the Ottoman sultan. Burton’s account here is an illustrative narrative, not independent confirmation of the event.

8973.“Insult over” means triumph or exult over. Burton compresses and alters Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond: the consulted text has a seven-line stanza beginning with her power over a king, not Burton’s four-line excerpt.

8976.The verse concerns the supreme god’s transformations in pursuit of beauty. Burton cites Strozzi the younger without a poem number; the list and attribution remain to be collated. “Morosiora” means more exacting or difficult to please.

8978.“Genii” here means spirits. Burton returns to his earlier discussion of spiritual beings in love. “Barbarians” is the inherited Greek and Roman category in these quotations, not an editorial classification.

8980.Burton reports Euripides through Clement of Alexandria, not from a specified direct reading of the play. The margin leaves the book number after Stromatum incomplete; the precise passage remains to be located.

8981.Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.59 (590d–e), says Hypereides first spoke unsuccessfully, then exposed Phryne’s breast and appealed to pity and fear of condemning a priestess of Aphrodite. Burton’s “no other defence” compresses this sequence. His description of the charge as lewdness and his intermediary remain unverified; the narrative is preserved as he tells it.

8982.Parthenopaeus is a youthful warrior in the Theban cycle. The claim of immunity is rhetorical: Burton is accumulating exemplary stories about beauty, not offering a consistent historical demonstration.

8984.Sinalda is Burton’s printed form of the name. The story is attributed to Saxo Grammaticus, book 8; the name, circumstances and passage remain to be collated.

8986.The scene is Apuleius, Metamorphoses 6.28–29, not book 8 as in the margin. The ass is the transformed human narrator Lucius. The woman’s speech includes precisely the thanks, honours and food mentioned here.

8987.“Trick” means dress or adorn. Apuleius 6.29 places virgo regia in the opposite order to Burton’s regia virgo; both mean “royal maiden.” The picture and inscription are part of her proposed reward.

8988.Apuleius 6.28 gives both the kisses and the attempted answering bray. Burton repeats and interprets the episode through the ass’s human consciousness; the modern version preserves that narrative complication.

8990.“Curvet” means perform a prancing leap. The horse passage is assigned to book 3 of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica; its exact text remains to be collated.

8992.“Parasite” means a dependent flatterer or hanger-on. The anecdote satirizes flattery as well as celebrating beauty. Burton’s printed Malthus and reference to Athenaeus, book 8, have not yet been securely identified.

8995.Apuleius, Metamorphoses 5.23, imagines that Psyche’s lamp wished to touch and kiss Cupid, so that a drop of hot oil fell on his shoulder. Burton calls the lamp a candle. The modern version retains his object and his playful interpretation.

8996.Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis 871–874. Burton compresses and alters the passage: Shakespeare has thigh where Burton gives legs, and describes Venus breaking away from the embrace. Burton’s changed final line is retained and modernized, rather than replaced with Shakespeare’s wording.

8998.The lines occur in George Chapman’s continuation of Hero and Leander, Fifth Sestiad 43–44. There, “her fingers” refers to personified Music accompanying a wedding procession. Burton changes And to The, cuts the second line short, and applies the image to Hero playing the lute. His Marlow attribution is preserved; the edition he used remains unidentified.

9000.Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.527–528, during Daphne’s flight from Apollo. Burton’s framing gives the winds their own desire; the Latin describes them exposing her body and tossing her clothes.

9001.Boreas is the north wind; the Hellespont is the strait Leander swims to reach Hero. Ericthon is retained from Burton; the parentage and the Hyacinthus association require collation. Burton’s vi rapuit expressly says that Orithyia is abducted by force.

9003.Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.575–577. Burton substitutes Alphei and recitavit for the consulted text’s Elei and narravit. The first two lines introduce Arethusa’s story, while the third begins her own speech. The change from narrator to speaker is retained.