MEMBER 4 SUBSECTION 1 Symptoms or signs of love melancholy in body and mind Good and bad signs and so forth

The symptoms are either bodily or mental. Bodily symptoms include paleness, thinness, dryness and so on. “Every lover is pale; this colour suits a lover,” as the poet describes them; “love has caused wasting”: love makes people thin. Avicenna, in chapter 33, On Love, lists hollow eyes and dryness as symptoms of this disease, together with going about smiling to oneself or behaving as though one saw or heard something delightful.

Valleriola, in book 3, chapter 7 of his Observations; Laurentius, chapter 10; Eliano Montalto, On Love Melancholy; and Lange, in book 1, letter 24 of his Medical Letters, say much the same: “The bloodless body is pale; the body thin, the eyes hollow.” Thin and pale:

Like someone who has trodden on a snake with bare heels.

Hollow-eyed, their eyes sunken in their heads:

And the tender beauty of the radiant body has faded.

They waste away and look ill from sleeplessness, cares and sighs:

And the eyes that bore the marks of Phoebus’s torch No longer shine with their ancestral radiance.

With groans, grief, sadness and listlessness:

No thought now arises Of food or health.

Loss of appetite, and so on. Jason Pratensis explains all this: “Because the spirits are distracted, the liver fails to do its work and does not turn food into blood as it should. The limbs are consequently weak for lack of nourishment; they grow thin and wither, as the herbs in my garden do this May for lack of rain.” Thus young women often develop the green sickness, and men cachexia, or a poor bodily condition, besides their usual sighs, complaints and lamentations, which are all too frequent. Like drops from a still:

As liquid drips from a fire enclosed.

So Cupid’s fire draws tears from a true lover’s eyes.

Mighty Mars often cried out for Venus, Secretly wetting his fearsome cheek With womanish tears.

Fire is distilled into water; The abundant stream that bathes the face will bear witness.

Along with many other such sufferings. When Chariclea fell in love with Theagenes, as Heliodorus describes her, “she was half distracted, spoke without knowing what she said, sighed to herself, lay awake much of the time and suddenly grew thin.” And when the other woman became infatuated with her stepson, “an ugly pallor, languishing eyes,” and so forth: she had an ugly pallor, hollow eyes, restless thoughts and shortness of breath.

In a letter to his mistress Lucretia, Euryalus complains, among other grievances, “You have deprived me of both sleep and food”: you have taken away my appetite and my sleep. So the poet describes it accurately:

His sleep, his food, his drink are taken from him, So that he grows thin, as dry as an arrow shaft; His eyes are hollow and dreadful to behold, His complexion pale and ashen to describe; He is solitary, always alone, And lies awake all night, lamenting.

In Idyll 2, Theocritus makes a beautiful girl of Delphis, in love with a young man of Myndus, confess as much:

As soon as I saw him, I went mad; my mind was stricken. My beauty wasted away, poor wretch; I no longer cared For any procession, nor did I know when I would return home; a burning sickness consumed me. I lay in bed ten days and ten nights; The hair fell from my head, and all that remained Was skin and bone.

No sooner had I seen him than I went mad; My beauty faded, and I no longer cared For any pomp; I did not know where I was, But I was sick, and fared badly; I lay in bed for ten days and nights, A skeleton in everyone’s eyes.

That epic poet expresses all these sufferings well in the person of Dido:

But not the Phoenician woman, unhappy in her soul; never Is she released into sleep, nor with eyes and heart does she receive Love; cares redouble, and, rising once again, Love rages, and so forth.

Unhappy Dido could not sleep at all, But lies awake and takes no rest; She gets up again, while care and grief And raging love torment her breast.

Actius Sannazarius, in Eclogue 2, On Galatea, similarly depicts his Lycoris tormenting herself through sleeplessness, sighing, sobbing and lamentation. In Eustathius, Ismenias is greatly troubled, his heart pounding at the sight of his mistress; he cannot sleep, and his bed is a bed of thorns. All these writers make thinness, loss of appetite and sleeplessness common symptoms. By these means lovers are often brought so low, so altered and changed, that, as the character jokes in the comedy, one can scarcely recognize them as the same people.

Sleepless nights waste young men’s bodies, As do care and the grief that comes with boundless love.

There are many such bodily symptoms by which to recognize lovers: “For who conceals love well?” Can a man, asks Solomon in Proverbs 6:27, carry fire in his breast and not be burned? It can scarcely be hidden. Whatever they do to conceal it, it must come out; it can be detected “by more than a thousand signs.”

The more the fire is covered, the more fiercely it burns beneath its cover.

Long ago the comic poet Antiphanes observed that love and drunkenness cannot be concealed: “You may hide other things, except these two: drinking wine,” and so forth. Words, looks and gestures will all betray lovers; but two of the clearest signs can be observed in their pulse and their expression.

When Antiochus, son of Seleucus, was sick with love for his stepmother Stratonice and would not confess his suffering or the cause of his illness, the physician Erasistratus discovered from his pulse and expression that he was in love with her: whenever she appeared or was named, his pulse changed and he blushed. In exactly this way the physician Panacaeus discovered the love of Callicles, son of Polycles, as you may read at length in Aristaenetus.