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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Subsection 5 the Last and Best Cure for Love Melancholy Is to Let Lovers Have…

An honest countryman in the kingdom of Naples, as Fulgosius relates, was ploughing by the sea when he saw his wife carried away by Mauritanian pirates. He ran after them in all haste, first up to his chin in the water; when he could wade no farther, he swam, calling to the ship’s commander to release his wife. If she could not be restored to him, he asked to accompany her as a prisoner. He was resolved to become a galley slave, the commander’s drudge, willing to endure any misery if only he could be with his dear wife.

The Moors, seeing the man’s steadfastness and reporting the whole affair to their governor at Tunis, set them both free and gave them a substantial allowance to support them for the rest of their lives.

I could tell many stories to this effect. But suppose things often turn out otherwise: to avoid marriage altogether because it is troublesome is no sound argument. “Whoever would avoid trouble must avoid the world”—Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, book 5, chapter 50.

I do not deny that there is some trouble in marriage. “Even if marriage is burdensome,” says Erasmus, “it is nevertheless sweetened by many things,” and so on. There are many things to sweeten it: a pleasant wife—“a pleasing wife”; pretty children—“dear children, the delights of the sons of men,” their chief delight; Ecclesiastes 2:8, and so forth.

And in any case, even if it were nothing but trouble, “it must be swallowed for the sake of the public good, a burden willingly undertaken”: it must willingly be endured for the public good.

Hear this, people, says Susarion: Women are an evil; nevertheless, my countrymen, Without this evil one cannot keep a household.

Hear me, my countrymen, says Susarion: Women are bad, yet there is no living without one.

“Woman is an evil, but a necessary evil.” They are necessary evils, and for our own ends we must make use of them to have children—“Venus replenishes and restores the human race”—and to propagate the Church.

For what purpose is a man born? Why does he live, except to increase the world’s population? And how can he do that properly if he does not marry? “Marriage bestows immortality on the human race,” says Nevisanus: matrimony makes us immortal. And according to Tacitus, it is “the strongest bulwark of an empire,” its sole and chief support.

He lives unworthily through whom no other lives.

This was the objection Pelopidas made to Epaminondas: a man was an unworthy member of a commonwealth if he left no child behind to defend it. And as Trismegistus said to his son Tatius, “Have no dealings with an unmarried man.”

He apparently held that a bachelor could not live honourably as he ought, agreeing with Georgius Wicelius, a great theologian and holy man, who has lately advanced twenty-six arguments commending marriage as most necessary for every kind of person, highly praiseworthy and fit to be embraced. He is also persuaded that no man can live and die religiously, as he ought, without a wife—“persuaded that no one can either live piously or die well without a wife.”

Such a man is false, an enemy of the commonwealth, harmful to himself, destructive to the world, an apostate from nature, a rebel against heaven and earth. Let our wilful, obstinate and ageing bachelors ponder this.

“If we could live without wives,” as Marcellus Numidicus said in Aulus Gellius, “we would all do without them; but since we cannot, let everyone marry, and consider the public good rather than personal pleasure or circumstances.”

It would be a happy thing, as wise Euripides puts it, if we could buy children with gold and silver and so provide ourselves, “without intercourse with women,” without women’s company. But that cannot be.

The world will lie foul in squalid neglect; The empty sea will stand without any fleets, And birds will be missing from the sky, wild beasts from the woods.

Earth, air, sea and land would soon come to nothing; The world itself would be brought to ruin.

Necessity therefore compels us to marry.

But why do I trouble myself to find arguments to recommend marriage or persuade people to it? Here is a brief summary of everything I have said, and much more, expressed concisely, forcefully, movingly, clearly and elegantly in twelve considerations to soften the miseries of marriage, by Jacobus de Voragine.

1 Have you property? You have someone to preserve and increase it. 2 Have you none? You have someone to acquire it. 3 Are you prospering? Your happiness is doubled.

4 Are you in adversity? She comforts you, stays beside you and shares the burden to make it bearable. 5 Are you at home? She drives away the weariness of solitude. 6 Abroad? Her eyes follow you as you leave; she misses you when absent and welcomes you back with joy.

7 Is nothing pleasant without companionship? No companionship is sweeter than marriage. 8 The bond of conjugal love is unbreakable. 9 The dear company of relatives by marriage grows; the number of parents, brothers, sisters and descendants is doubled.

10 May you become a parent of fine children. 11 The law of Moses curses barrenness in marriage; how much more, then, celibacy? 12 If nature does not escape punishment, neither will the will escape it.

1 Have you means? You have someone to preserve and increase them. 2 Have you none? You have someone to help obtain them. 3 Are you prosperous? Your happiness is doubled.

11252.Fulgosius is Battista Fregoso. Burton presents the captive couple as an example of conjugal devotion; the precise passage in Fregoso remains to be collated. Mauritanian and Moors are his historical terms for North Africans here, not references to the boundaries of the modern state of Mauritania. Honest pension means a respectable or sufficient allowance.

11254.Burton’s reference to Preparation for the Gospel 5.50 is retained. Book 5 of the Gifford text consulted ends at chapter 36, and the quoted saying has not been located there. The attribution and numbering require further collation.

11256.The Greek margin is the opening of Mimnermus, fragment 1; Cypris is Aphrodite or Venus. Ecclesiastes 2:8 contains the phrase delights of the sons of men, but its application to children is Burton’s. His Latin repetitions are translated separately rather than silently absorbed into the English.

11259.The English fragment attributed to Susarion in the Ancient History Sourcebook includes his parentage and home, and ends by calling both marriage and non-marriage bad. These details are absent from Burton’s three Latin lines; his English couplet condenses them further. The Greek attribution and his cited Stobaeus intermediary remain uncollated.

11262.The necessary-evil maxim is attributed in Burton’s margin to Menander, without a work or fragment number. The following phrase adapts Seneca, Phaedra 469–470, where Venus replenishes a depleted race. These are arguments in Burton’s debate about marriage, including its instrumental and hostile descriptions of women.

11265.Nevisanus is Giovanni Nevizzano. The unmarked Lib. 3. num. 1. appears immediately below the Seneca reference in the margin; it is provisionally attached to Nevizzano, whose work is numbered by books and sections, rather than to Seneca’s play. The printed Tacitus reference says Histories 4; the precise passage remains unlocated.

11267.Burton attributes the line to Palingenius, without giving a book or line. It means that the man who does not give life to another lives unworthily; its exact location remains to be checked.

11270.Compare Nepos, Epaminondas 10: Pelopidas reproaches his childlessness; he calls Leuctra an enduring daughter. For Hermes Trismegistus, Everard’s Divine Pymander 9.77–79 condemns childlessness and tells Asclepius not to congratulate a childless man. This differs from Burton’s instruction to Tat to avoid an unmarried man. It is a contextual parallel; the precise Hermetic wording and Brusonius route remain untraced.

11271.Georgius Wicelius is Georg Witzel. The count of twenty-six arguments and the judgement on unmarried men are Burton’s report, not independently verified here. The source prints must laudable, understood as most laudable in the modern version. Stale bachelors means men grown old in bachelorhood.

11273.Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 1.6, calls the speaker Metellus Numidicus, not Burton’s Marcellus. Burton abbreviates the argument; Gellius says nature prevents living entirely without wives, although life with them is not wholly comfortable. Want them here means do without them. The printed name is retained in both columns; Burton’s precise intermediary has not been established.

11275.Compare Euripides, Hippolytus 616–624: Hippolytus wishes men could buy children at temples without women. Burton turns a character’s hostile speech into a general saying of wise Euripides. His precise Latin intermediary remains unidentified.

11277.Seneca, Phaedra 471–473. Burton prints Vanum and classibus, empty and fleets; the Latin text consulted has vacuum and piscibus, empty and fish. Classibus belongs to the manuscript tradition; piscibus is an emendation. The translation follows Burton’s ships, while his following English couplet gives a looser summary. Eftsoon here means soon.

11279.Burton attributes this numbered collection to Jacobus de Voragine; its exact source remains unidentified. Motions are propositions or considerations; pathetically means movingly, appealing to feeling. The margin invokes Genesis 2:18, the creation of a fitting helper.

11280.Adamantine means as hard or unbreakable as adamant. Affines are relations acquired through marriage; nepotes can mean grandchildren or descendants, as well as nephews. Descendants is used here and for Burton’s corresponding English nephewes.

11281.The last two arguments treat involuntary childlessness as nature’s punishment and voluntary celibacy as still less excusable. This is the historical argument being reproduced. The alleged Mosaic curse is not supplied with a specific biblical reference by Burton, and should not be read as an established theological conclusion.

11282.The source’s first English item prints none to keep and increase it, reversing both its own Latin habes quæ tueatur and the argument. The modern version reads someone as a transparent correction; the original column preserves none. Burton’s English twelve-point version remains separate from the translated Latin list.