The Anatomy of Melancholy

This is what makes them take such pains and burst into those ridiculous strains: this high opinion of themselves, making them scorn everyone else “with ridiculous arrogance and intolerable contempt,” as Palaemon the grammarian despised Varro, “boasting that learning had been born with him and would die with him.” It brings them to such a pitch of insolence that they cannot bear contradiction or listen to anything but their own praises, as Jerome observes of such men. Augustine aptly supports him: their only study, day and night, is to be praised and applauded.

Yet in the judgment of all wise men, “whose hearts have understanding,” they are mad, empty vessels, mushrooms, out of their senses, objects of derision. “Like the camel in the proverb, which sought horns and lost even the ears it already had,” their works are trifles, like an out-of-date almanac: “they perish through their author’s chatter.” They seek fame and immortality, but reap dishonour and infamy. They are common objects of abuse, “senseless,” and fall far short of what they suppose or expect. “O boy, I fear you will not live long.”

Of the many thousands of poets, rhetoricians, philosophers and sophists who wrote in former ages, scarcely one in a thousand has works that survive, as Eusebius aptly observes: “their names and books have perished together with their bodies”; their books and bodies have perished together. It is not as they vainly think, that they will certainly be admired and immortal. As someone told Philip of Macedon, exulting after a victory, that his shadow was no longer than before, so we may say to them,

We marvel, but not with the idle crowd: Rather as at Harpies, Gorgons and Furies.

We marvel too, though not as common people do, But as at Gorgons, Harpies or Furies.

Or if we do applaud, honour and admire: “what a small part”—how small a part, compared with the whole world, ever so much as hears our names! How few take notice of us; how narrow a region, as tiny as Alcibiades’ land on a map! Yet every man must and will be immortal, so he hopes, and spread his fame to the other side of the earth, when half—no, not even a quarter—of his own province or city knows him or hears of him.

But suppose they did. What is a city beside a kingdom, a kingdom beside Europe, Europe beside the world, or the world itself, which must come to an end, compared with the smallest visible star in the firmament, eighteen times larger than it? Then, if those stars are infinite, and every star is a sun, as some maintain, and each, like our own sun, has its planets around it, all inhabited, what proportion do we bear to them, and where is our glory?

“The victorious Roman held the whole world,” as he boasted in Petronius: the whole world was under Augustus. So, too, in Constantine’s time, Eusebius boasts that he governed the whole world: “he ruled the entire world most splendidly—and all the nations of the earth were subject to the emperor.” The same is said of Alexander, the four monarchies, and so on, though neither Greeks nor Romans ever possessed a fifteenth of the world now known, or half of what was then described.