The Anatomy of Melancholy

The reason Love was always portrayed as young, according to Phornutus and others, “is that young people are most disposed to love; soft, beautiful and plump, because such people are most readily captivated; naked, because all true affection is simple and open. He smiles because he is merry and given to pleasure; he carries a quiver to show his power, which no one can escape; and he is blind because he does not see where he strikes or whom he hits,” and so on.

The poets express his power and sovereignty by holding him to be a god, a mighty commanding god above Jupiter himself: “a great spirit,” as Plato calls him; the strongest and merriest of all the gods, according to Alcinous and Athenaeus. “Love is king of men; Love is king of gods too,” says Euripides: god of gods and governor of humanity. We must all pay him homage, keep a holy day for his divinity, adore him in his temples, worship his image—“for this divinity is no mere name”—and sacrifice at his altar: he conquers and rules everyone.

I would rather wrestle with a lion, a stag and the Aeolian boar, With Antaeus and the Stymphalian birds, Than with Love—

I would rather fight bulls, lions, bears and giants than Love. So powerful is he that he compels everyone to pay him tribute, lords it over all, and makes whomever he pleases mad or sane. Indeed, Caecilius, in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, considers anyone who does not acknowledge Love as a great god no better than a fool or an idiot.

In whose hands it lies to choose whom he would drive mad, Whom make wise, whom cast into sickness, and so on.

He can make sick or cure whomever he pleases. Homer and Stesichorus were both struck blind, if you believe Leone Ebreo, for speaking against his divinity.

And although Aristophanes degrades him, saying that he was contemptuously expelled from the council of the gods, his wings clipped so that he could no longer come among them, and, to disgrace him further, banished from heaven for ever and confined to earth, still his power, majesty, omnipotence and dominion are such that no creature can resist him.

Cupid commands even the gods as he pleases, And mighty Jupiter himself cannot restrain him.

He is more than an equal partner of the gods—

He holds The sea through Thetis, the shades through Aeacus, heaven through Jove.

He has not merely possession but dominion. Jupiter himself was transformed for love into a satyr, a shepherd, a bull, a swan, a shower of gold and every imaginable thing. As Lucian’s Juno quite rightly reproached him, “you are Love’s plaything”—you are Cupid’s whirligig. How he lorded it over all the other gods: Mars, Neptune, Pan, Mercury, Bacchus and the rest!