“Who,” says Castiglione, “would learn to play, devote himself to music, learn to dance, or write so many verses and love songs, as most do, except for women’s sake, hoping by these means to gain their goodwill and win their favour?” We see this confirmed every day in our young women and wives. Those who, as unmarried girls, worked so hard at singing, playing and dancing, at such expense to their parents, to acquire those graceful accomplishments, will scarcely touch an instrument now they are married: they no longer care for it.

Constantine, in his Agriculture, book 11, chapter 18, makes Cupid himself a great dancer: as evidence, while capering among the gods, “he knocked down a bowl of nectar, which dripped onto the white rose and made it red ever afterwards.” And Callistratus, with Daedalus’s help, “made a group of young girls continually dancing” around Cupid’s statue, presumably to show that Cupid was very fond of dancing—as undoubtedly he was.

For at his wedding to Psyche, with the gods present to honour the feast, Ganymede poured nectar in abundance, as Apuleius describes it. Vulcan was the cook; the Hours decorated everything with roses and flowers; Apollo played the harp and the Muses sang to it; “but Venus stepped forward and danced to the sweet music”—his mother Venus danced to his delight and theirs.

Witty Lucian, in that moving love passage, his pleasing description of Jupiter’s abduction of Europa and swim from Phoenicia to Crete, makes the sea calm and the winds still. Neptune and Amphitrite ride in their chariot to break the waves before them; Tritons dance all around, each carrying a torch; half-naked sea nymphs keep time on dolphins’ backs and sing the wedding song; Cupid trips nimbly over the water; and Venus herself follows in a shell, strewing roses and flowers over their heads.

In all his representations of Love, Praxiteles depicts Cupid smiling and watching dancers; and in St Mark’s Garden in Rome, one of the most delightful pieces—I do not know whose work it is—shows a group of satyrs dancing around a sleeping girl. So dancing is always, as it were, a necessary accompaniment to love affairs. Young girls are never happier than when, on a holiday after evensong, they can meet their sweethearts and dance around a maypole, or on a town green beneath a shady elm.

Nothing is more common in France than for townsmen’s wives and unmarried women to dance in a circle in the streets, often, for lack of better instruments, making good music with their own voices and dancing to it. Indeed, love often makes old men and women with more toes than teeth dance to “John, come kiss me now,” take part in masques and go mumming. For Comus and Hymen delight immensely in masques and all such merriment: in some circumstances they will allow men to wear women’s clothes, and people of every kind to dance together—young and old, rich and poor, noble and low-born.

Paolo Giovio censures the philosopher Agostino Nifo because, “though an old man, a public professor and the father of many children, he was so madly in love with a young girl”—a sight that shamed many of his friends—“that, old and gouty as he was, he would still dance to fiddlers.” Many laughed him to scorn, but all-powerful love insisted on it.

With a hyacinth wand, Hurrying Love drove me Forcibly to follow.

Hasty Love, with his purple staff, compelled Me to follow and take up the dance.

There is nothing new in this, nothing improper; a good reason can be given for it. Cupid and Death met at an inn and, being in a merry mood, exchanged some arrows from their quivers. Ever since, young men die and old men often fall foolishly in love.

Thus the young man dies; thus the dying man loves.

Who, then, can resist it? Once we are in love, young or old, though our teeth rattle in our heads like the jacks of a virginal, or stand far apart like the arches of a bridge, there is no help for it: if need be, we must dance Trenchmore over tables, chairs, stools and so on. And princum prancum is a fine dance.

Plutarch, in Table Talk, book 1, question 5, offers some excuse for it, and explains the sense in which “love teaches music, even to someone previously unskilled”: how love makes people with no previous ability learn to sing and dance. He concludes that it is simply the power and authority love has over us. “Love,” he maintains, “will make a silent man speak, a shy man most obliging, the dull quick, the slow nimble; and, most remarkable of all, it will make a hard, mean, unmanageable churl—as fire softens iron in a smith’s forge—open-handed, accommodating, gentle and easy to persuade.”

Indeed, it will drive him to the opposite extreme of extravagance, paying a hundred sesterces for a night’s lodging, as men once did to Lais of Corinth, or “two hundred thousand drachmas for a single night,” as Mundus offered Paulina; spending his entire fortune, as too many do in such cases, to gain his desire. This is why many compare love to wine, which makes men jovial and merry, playful and sad, whine, sing, dance—and what does it not make them do?

But above all the other symptoms of lovers, this must not lightly be passed over: whatever their condition, once they fall in love they usually become, as their ability permits, rhymesters, ballad-makers and poets. For, as Plutarch says, “They will bear witness to their beloveds’ good qualities and proclaim them abroad, adorning them with verses and songs of praise, as we adorn statues with gold, so that everyone may remember and admire them.”

Old men will sometimes dote in this way as much as anyone else. Love’s heat will thaw their frozen feelings, melt the ice of age, and so invigorate them that, though they are sixty above the waist, they are scarcely thirty below it. Giovanni Pontano makes an old fool rhyme and turn into a would-be poet to please his mistress: