Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

Reading language

Persistence and Opportunity of Time and Place; Meetings, Conversation…

Persistence and opportunity of time and place; meetings, conversation, singing, dancing, music, amorous tales and sights, kissing, familiarity, tokens, gifts, bribes, promises, declarations, tears, and so on.

All the attractions considered so far operate from afar, at a distance. I will come closer to those further stages of love: meetings, kissing, dalliance, conversation, singing, dancing, amorous tales and sights, gifts, and so on. Like so many Sirens, they steal away the hearts of men and women. As Achilles Tatius observes in book 2, “A young woman’s eyes alone do not sufficiently test her affection. You must say something more effective and employ other powerful devices. Take her hand, squeeze her fingers firmly, and sigh as you do so. If she takes this well and seems not greatly averse, then call her your mistress, put your arms about her neck and kiss her,” and so on.

But none of this can happen unless they first have opportunities to live or meet together, to come in, go out and return. Letters, recommendations, outward gestures and actions can do much; but when people live near one another—in the same street or village, or together in a house—love suddenly catches fire. Through such opportunity and persistence, many a serving man entices his master’s daughter; many a gallant loves a slattern; many a gentleman pursues his wife’s maids; many ladies dote on their servants, as Ariosto’s queen doted on the dwarf. Many matches are made hastily in this way, as though necessity compelled the pair to love. Had they been free, mixed with other people, seen the variety available elsewhere or compared each other with someone else, they would never have looked at one another.

Without that opportunity for conversation and familiarity, they would have loathed and despised the people towards whom fate now drives them for want of better choice or other objects of desire. Their hot blood, idle life, rich diet and so on force them to dote on whoever is nearest. Often, too, people who initially feel no liking or affection for one another—who are prickly and quick to quarrel, offended by each other’s behaviour, like Benedick and Beatrice in the comedy, and finding many faults in one another—through sharing a house, talking, kissing, embracing and similar attractions gradually begin to fall in love without noticing it.

This was the strongest inducement for Potiphar’s wife to dote on Joseph, and for Clitophon to love Leucippe, his uncle’s daughter. Because of the plague at Byzantium, he happened to live with her for a time and sit beside her at table, as he tells the story himself in Tatius, book 2. Although it is fiction, it rests on good observation and expresses lovers’ passions well. He had opportunities to take her hand, and after a while to kiss her and touch her breasts, and so on, which almost drove him mad.

Ismenius the orator makes a similar confession in Eustathius, book 1. When he first came to Sosthenes’s house and sat at table with his friend Cratistes, Sosthenes’s daughter Ismene waited on them, with her breasts exposed and her arms half bare—

Barefoot, her dress loosened at the breast, her arms bare—

After the Greek fashion of those times—“her arms bare for more than half their length,” as Daphne’s were when she fled from Phoebus, a sight that deeply moved him. Ismene was always ready to attend to him and pour his drink. Her eyes never left him: “imploring eyes,” those speaking, courting, enchanting eyes. She kept smiling at him. When they had risen and she found a little opportunity, she came and drank to him, treading on his toes as she did so. She would come and go, and when the company prevented him from speaking, she would squeeze his hand and blush when she met him.

By these means she first overcame him: “As I drank, I drank in love as well.” She would kiss the cup, drink to him, smile and drink from the same side of the cup where he had drunk. Through these mutual embraces, kisses, hand-squeezings, foot-pressings and so on, “I seemed to be sipping the girl herself.” I sipped and sipped and sipped, until suddenly I found myself drunk with love.

In Aristaenetus, Philocharinus happened to meet a beautiful young woman, a complete stranger. He looked back at her; she looked back at him and smiled.

That day was the beginning of death, the first Cause of evils——and so on.

That alone led to their further acquaintance and the love that ruined him.

Oh, it is unsafe to trust any blandishments.

These opportunities of time and place, with their attendant circumstances, are such powerful inducements that it is almost impossible for two young people of the same age to live together without falling in love—especially in great households and princely courts, where they are idle “to the highest degree,” eat well, live at ease and do not know how else to spend their time.

Put Hippolytus there: he will become Priapus.

Achilles’s mother Thetis sent him while still a minor to be brought up on Scyros, the island in the Aegean Sea then ruled by Lycomedes. This was to escape the cruel destiny foretold by the oracle: that he would be killed at the siege of Troy. For that reason he was raised in the women’s quarters among the king’s children, dressed as a woman. But see the outcome! He slept with the king’s beautiful daughter Deidamia and had a fine son by her, called Pyrrhus.

The philosopher Peter Abelard tells his own story. Fulbert, the uncle of the lovely Heloise, appointed him to teach his niece and lodged him in his house for that purpose. Thus “a tender lamb was entrusted to a hungry wolf”—I use his own words. Abelard soon won her affection: “there were more kisses than learned statements,” and he lectured more on love than on any other subject. Opportunity can play such pretty tricks: “first joined in one house, then in their minds,” and so on.

9389.Importunity means persistent urging or solicitation; conference means personal meetings or conversation; protestations are emphatic declarations, often of love. The heading outlines the entire new subsection. This block covers its opening discussion of proximity and familiarity; singing, music and later topics continue beyond it.

9391.Tacius is Achilles Tatius, author of Leucippe and Clitophon. Engines means devices or stratagems. Burton’s English says to say something where the marginal Latin says to do something; it also expands kissing the neck into embracing and kissing. His description turns the testing of a woman’s reactions into a technique of courtship.

9393.Dowdy is an insulting term for an unattractive or slovenly woman. Men in “their men” means male servants. The queen-and-dwarf example is attributed to Ariosto but has not been collated here. The marginal proverb compares restricted choice in love to hunger overcoming distaste; puddings are food, not necessarily sweet desserts.

9395.Burton’s Benedict and Betteris are Shakespeare’s Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. Their antagonistic exchanges develop into acknowledged love, assisted by their friends’ contrivances. Burton uses them as an analogy for intimacy overcoming initial dislike. Colling means embracing; insensibly means imperceptibly.

9398.Potiphar’s wife pursues Joseph in Genesis 39. Burton’s Tatius references disagree: book 1 in the margin, book 2 in the body. His remark explicitly defends fiction as evidence about human passions. The plague, chronology and details of his retelling remain to be collated against the Greek novel; they are preserved as his narrative here.

9399.Burton turns to the romance usually called Hysmine and Hysminias, attributed to Eustathius. His forms Ismene and Ismenius are retained in the modern version. The quoted scenes are literary courtship, not direct testimony about Greek social customs. The precise Latin intermediary remains unidentified.

9401.Mantuan is the Latin poet Battista Mantovano. The line describes an uncovered foot, loosened clothing at the breast and bare arms. Burton inserts it into his prose account of Ismene. The exact poem and line remain unlocated.

9404.Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.501, describes Daphne’s arms as Apollo gazes at her. Phoebus is Apollo. Burton inserts this fragment into the romance scene and then resumes Ismene’s attentions. The Latin marginal account and the English body overlap but are not word-for-word equivalents; both are preserved.

9405.The repeated sipping turns drinking into an image of erotic absorption. Burton gives Latin phrases and then expands the final one into his own repeated English verb. Their separate effects are kept in the modern column, rather than reducing the sequence to a single statement.

9407.Aristaenetus, Letter 4 as cited by Burton. The brief mutual backward glance illustrates how a small gesture can initiate acquaintance. The precise edition and full episode have not yet been collated.

9409.Virgil, Aeneid 4.169–170, on Dido and Aeneas entering the cave. The consulted text has primus leti, where Burton reverses the order to lethi primus. Burton transfers the tragic foreshadowing to a different love story; the lineation follows his printed quotation.

9411.Propertius 1.15.42. Blandishments are flattering or caressing attentions. The Latin’s emphatic negative is rendered idiomatically as “unsafe to trust any.” The speaker’s warning concludes an accusation of Cynthia’s faithlessness.

9412.Great houses are aristocratic households. Burton’s claim about the near inevitability of love combines proximity with wealth, leisure and abundant food. It carries forward his account of idleness and rich living as conditions that nourish erotic melancholy.

9414.Ovid, Amores 2.4.32, not 2.2 as printed in the margin. Hippolytus represents chastity; Priapus is a sexually potent fertility god. The abrupt transformation is comic exaggeration, applied by Burton to the temptations of a leisured household.

9415.Geneseo is provisionally understood as gynaeceo, “in the women’s quarters”; the printed form remains on the left. Nonage means minority. Comprest is a sexual euphemism. Pyrrhus is also called Neoptolemus. The Achilles narrative and its precise intermediary remain for collation.

9416.Abelard’s Historia calamitatum supplies the lamb-and-wolf comparison, kisses and lessons, and shared house followed by shared affection. Burton condenses the wording; the consulted Latin has teneram, not tenellam. Names are normalized to Abelard and Heloise. The printed plea is read contextually as play. This is Abelard’s retrospective account of his conduct.