Mertila in Aristaenetus swore she would never love Pamphilus again, and kept her passion under control while he was away. But the next time he appeared, she could not restrain herself: “embracing him lavishly, she lets herself be caressed,” and so forth. She broke her vow and embraced him without restraint.

Hermotinus, a young man in the same author, is every bit as unsteady. He had quite forgotten his mistress, and his friends had thoroughly weaned him from loving her; but, seeing her by chance, “he recognized the traces of the old flame” and raved violently. “Yet, coming into view, she began to shine like a bright star,” and so forth: she appeared to his eyes like a blazing star or an angel. And it is the common experience of all lovers to be overcome in this way.

For that reason, presumably, Alexander recognized the trouble and danger that come from looking. When he heard Darius’s wife so highly praised for her beauty, he would scarcely allow her into his sight, perhaps anticipating Plutarch’s saying, “to look at a beautiful woman is most dangerous.” Though intemperate in other things, in this “he bore himself nobly”: he behaved admirably.

Likewise, when Araspas in Xenophon had so greatly praised Panthea’s divine face to Cyrus, the more her beauty surpassed the ordinary, the less willing Cyrus was to see her.

Scipio, a young man of twenty-three and the most handsome of the Romans, equal in looks to the Greek Charinus or Homer’s Nireus, was besieging a city in Spain when a noble and very beautiful young gentlewoman was brought to him. Hearing that she was betrothed to a lord, he gave her gifts and sent her back to her sweetheart.

Saint Augustine, as Gregory reports, “thought he ought not to live even with his own sister”: he would not share a house with her. Xenocrates lay beside Lais of Corinth all night and would not touch her.

Although all Athens supposed Socrates to be infatuated with handsome Alcibiades, when he had an opportunity to sleep in the same room, “one man alone with another,” and was also courted by him, as Alcibiades publicly confessed, “he spurned his beauty and proudly disdained it”: he rejected him with scorn.

Petrarch, who had so exalted his Laura in various poems, would not accept her when she was offered to him through the Pope’s intervention.

“It is a great happiness to be free from this passion of love, and a man who can restrain himself so shows great judgment; but once you are in love, to govern yourself,” as he says, “is a rare achievement of wisdom.”

For avoiding being thrown into love’s snares Is not so difficult as escaping once caught in the nets And breaking through the strong knots of Venus.

Avoiding such nets is no great feat; Escaping once caught is the whole victory.

But few men are free of love, few lovers so prudent or able to restrain themselves and govern their passions, to curb their senses enough not to see the beloved, not to look lustfully or converse with them. Such is the fury of this headstrong passion of raging lust, and such their weakness: “that fierce ardour implanted by nature,” as he calls it, such furious desire has nature inscribed in us, such indescribable delight—

So does divine Venus’s frenzy Brood over minds so mad.

—from which neither reason, advice, poverty, pain, misery, drudgery, “the pain of childbirth,” nor anything else can deter them. We must use some swift means to correct and prevent this and all the other troubles that arise from conversation and the like. The best, readiest and surest way, approved by all, is “a change of place”: send them in different directions, so that they can neither hear of nor see each other, have another opportunity to send messages, or live together, “men alone with a woman,” like so many Gilbertines.

“Removal from one’s country” is Savonarola’s fourth rule, and Gordonius’s precept: “let him be sent away to distant regions”—send him travelling. This is what most pursue, like so many hounds in full cry: poets, theologians, philosophers, physicians, all say, “let him change his country.”

Valesius: “like a sick man, he must be cured by a change of air.” Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, book 4: the best remedy is to go away. Jason Pratensis and Laurentius: change your air and country.

Flee the beloved shore.

Virgil: It helps to avoid neighbouring places.

Ovid: Go far away, and keep travelling long roads. But flee, and you will be safe.

Travelling is an antidote to love:

I must journey far to learned Athens, So a long road may free me from oppressive love.

For this purpose, says Propertius, my parents sent me to Athens. Time and absence wear away pain and grief, as fire goes out for lack of fuel.

As far as love goes from the eyes, so far it will go from the mind.

But they must stay away long enough. Xenophon prescribes a whole year for Critobulus: “for you can scarcely be cured of love within that time.” Some can hardly be weaned from it any sooner.

Heinsius playfully presses all this in a letter to his friend Primerius: first fast; then wait; third, change your place; fourth, think of a noose. If a change of place, the passage of time and absence, together with the preceding remedies, will not wear it out, it will scarcely be removed. But these usually work.