The Anatomy of Melancholy

In that civilised commonwealth of China, a mother strangles her child if she cannot afford to bring it up, preferring to lose it rather than sell it or let it endure the misery of the poor. Arnobius, Against the Nations, book 7, and Lactantius, book 5, chapter 9, level the same accusation against the ancient Greeks and Romans: in such circumstances they exposed their children to wild beasts, strangled them or dashed their brains out against a stone.

If we may believe Münster, among us Christians in Lithuania people voluntarily enslave themselves, selling themselves, their wives and children to the rich to escape hunger and beggary. Many kill themselves in this extremity. When the Roman Apicius reckoned his accounts and found only a hundred thousand crowns remaining, he killed himself for fear of starving to death.

Pieter van Foreest, in his medical observations, gives a memorable example of two brothers of Leuven who, having no means, both became melancholy and, in a state of despair, killed themselves. He gives another of a merchant, learned and otherwise wise and judicious, who was so deeply afraid of a loss at sea that, like Ventidius in the poet, he could not be persuaded that he would not die a beggar.

In a word, I may conclude this much about the poor: although they have abilities, they cannot display or use them. “Poverty blocks the road to excellence.” It is hard for a poor man to rise: “those whose abilities are hindered by straitened circumstances at home do not easily emerge.” “The wisdom of the poor is despised, and his words are not heard,” Ecclesiastes 6:19. His works are rejected and despised because of their author’s lowly and obscure condition; however praiseworthy and good in themselves, they are unlikely to gain acceptance.

No poems can long give pleasure or live on That are written by drinkers of water.

Poor people cannot please. Their actions, advice, deliberations and plans are held in contempt by the world: “they lose their judgement in their affairs,” as Gnatho observed long ago. “The wise man never made himself slippers or sandals”: a wise man never cobbled shoes, as the old saying goes. But how does he prove it? I am sure we find otherwise in our own day: “eloquence shivers in frost-covered rags.”

Homer himself must beg if he lacks means, going from door to door and singing ballads with a group of boys around him, as he reportedly once did. This general misery of theirs must surely distress them and make them discontented and melancholy, as they usually are: irritable and peevish, like a weary traveller, for—

“Hunger and delay stir bile into the nostrils.”

They are always grumbling and repining: “those who fare badly are ill-tempered because of their want,” as Plutarch quotes from Euripides. The comic poet aptly seconds him: