The Anatomy of Melancholy

Benedetto Vittori of Faenza, in his Empirics, considers it a particular remedy against melancholy to hear and see singing, dancing, masked performers and mummers, and to spend time with such cheerful fellows and beautiful young women. “For a woman’s beauty cheers the face,” Ecclesiasticus 36:22.

Beauty alone is a supreme remedy for fear, grief, and every fit of melancholy: a charm, as Pierre de La Seine and many other writers affirm, a banquet in itself. He gives the example of the discontented Menelaus, so often relieved by Helen’s beautiful face. Cicero, in Tusculan Disputations, book 3, cites Epicurus as a leading advocate of this view. Sweet scents, good food, touch, taste, embraces, singing, dancing, games, entertainments, and above all exquisite beauties, “by which the eyes and minds are pleasantly moved,” are powerful means of banishing grief and giving pleasure: “beauty encountered”—meeting or seeing a beautiful young woman pass by, or being in her company.

He discovered this through experience and made good use of it himself, if Plutarch does not misrepresent him. Plutarch lists some particularly elegant beauties—Leontia, Boedina, Hedeia, and Nicedia—who were often seen in Epicurus’s garden and were familiar visitors in his house. Nor did he try it only on himself: if we may believe Athenaeus, he used it on others.

For when a sorrowful, sick patient was brought to him for treatment, he laid him on a down-filled bed and crowned him with a garland of fragrant flowers, in a handsome, perfumed chamber beautifully furnished. After giving him a draught or two of good drink, he brought in a beautiful young woman who could play the lute, sing, and dance, and so forth.

Cicero, in Tusculan Disputations, book 3, mocks Epicurus for this profane medicine, as he well deserved; yet Favorinus and Stobaeus highly approve of it. Most of our more permissive physicians allow it in certain cases, especially for patients of this kind.

All of them would have a melancholy, sorrowful, discontented person regularly take part in wholesome games, company, and recreation—and, as Rodrigo da Fonseca would have it, “be encouraged towards sexual pleasure by the sight and touch of the most beautiful women”: drawn into such company whether willing or not. He should sometimes participate himself, instead of merely listening or watching. “It is sweet to act foolishly at the proper time”—to play the fool now and then is no bad thing; there is a time for everything.

The solemn Socrates would sometimes make merry, sing, dance, and take a drink too, unless Theodoret misrepresents him. So would old Cato, Cicero by his own confession, and the rest. In his Symposium, Xenophon makes Socrates a leading participant, with no one merrier than he; sometimes he would ride a hobbyhorse with his children,

—riding astride a long reed,