The Anatomy of Melancholy

This leads Gordon the physician, chapter 20, part 2, to call this disease the characteristic passion of the nobility. Now, if weak judgement and a powerful imagination come together, how, asks Ercole Sassonia, can they resist? Savonarola treats it as almost peculiar to “monks, friars and members of religious orders, because they live in solitude, eat delicately and do nothing.” And well he may: how could they help it?

Diet alone can cause it. It is rare to see a young man or woman, of whatever station, who lives idly and eats well without being in love. Alcibiades was always dallying with wanton young women, extravagant in his spending, effeminate in his clothing, forever in love. But why? He was excessively fastidious about his food, and too frequent and excessive in his banqueting.

“Wherever there is freedom from care, lust holds sway.” Lust and untroubled ease rule together, as Saint Jerome declares. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath freely confirms all this:

For just as surely as cold engenders hail, A greedy tongue must have a lustful tail.

Especially if they encourage it with choice food, as those Sybarites and Phaeacians often do, eating lavishly and, if they had their way, eating nothing but foods that stimulate lust.

Above all, strong wine; pulses, beans, roots of every kind, well seasoned and generously sprinkled with pepper; garden cardoons, lettuces, rocket, turnips, leeks, onions, pine nuts, sweet almonds, medicinal pastes, syrups, juices, snails, shellfish, exquisitely prepared fish, small birds, animals’ testicles, eggs, seasonings of various kinds, soft beds, cushions, and so forth.

And almost everything physicians prescribe for someone suffering from sexual impotence they prize as though it were a compound aphrodisiac, together with dishes much more luxurious than these: honeyed wine, choice and exotic fruits, spices, cakes, extracted juices varied through many courses and surpassing wine itself in sweetness, and whatever the kitchen, pharmacy or almost any workshop can supply.

And when these debauchees commonly stuff themselves with such fare—as that man, for the sake of his Chryseis, dosed himself with bulbs and snails—and also prepare themselves for sex and train for this wrestling ground, how can they fail to fall desperately in love, how can they fail to go utterly mad?

“A heated belly soon discharges into lust,” says Jerome. “After dinner, Callirhoe.” For who can restrain himself? Wine is a luxurious thing: Augustine calls it fuel for lust; Bernard, a coaxing demon; Aristophanes, Venus’s milk.

Neither Etna nor Vesuvius blazes with such heat as the marrow of young people filled with wine, Jerome adds. Hence Lampsacus was formerly sacred to Priapus because of its excellent wine; and in Orpheus Venus is called the companion of revered Bacchus.

If plain wine, taken by itself, can do these things—for “Where are you carrying me, Bacchus, full of you?”—what madness, what frenzy should we not expect from the rest?