The Anatomy of Melancholy

It was Lucretia’s advice in Aretino: “If you wish to enjoy your mistress, promise, invent, swear, forswear yourself, boast, pretend and lie.” And they put it thoroughly into practice, as Apollo did with Daphne:

The land of Delphi serves me, And Claros, Tenedos and the palace of Patara; Jupiter is my father.

Delphi, Claros and Tenedos serve me, And Jupiter is known to be my father.

The poorest country lads will do as much:

I too have a flock of a thousand snow-white lambs in the valleys.

I have a thousand sheep, a good stock of cattle, and they are all at her command:

I, my household goods, And my lands will be at your service.

House, land and goods are at her service, as he is himself. Dinomachus, a senator’s son in Lucian, was in love with a girl beneath him in birth and fortune. To achieve his desire more quickly, he wept before her and swore that he loved her with all his heart, and her alone; and that as soon as his father died—a very rich man, almost decrepit—he would make her his wife.

The girl happened to tell her mother about it. An old fox, well versed in such matters, her mother told her daughter, who was now ready to yield to his desire, that he had no such intention. “Do you think he will ever care for you, a poor girl, when he can choose from all the beauties in the city: someone nobly born, with so many talents for her dowry, as young as you, better accomplished and more beautiful? Daughter, do not believe him.” The girl was disconcerted, and so the affair came to an end.

When Jupiter first courted Juno—as Lilius Giraldus relates from an old commentary on Theocritus—he turned himself into a cuckoo to advance his suit. Seeing her one day walking alone, apart from the other goddesses, he suddenly raised a storm, which frightened her into seeking shelter. Jupiter too flew into her lap to escape the storm: “he flew down into the maiden Juno’s lap.” Out of pity, Juno covered him with her apron.

But he immediately resumed his own shape, began to embrace her and attempted to force himself on her. “But she refused, for fear of her mother”: she would not yield at all, “until he gained his end by promising marriage.” He vowed and swore to marry her, and then she consented. This happened on Mount Thorax, afterwards always called Cuckoo Hill; and a temple to Juno Telia was erected there to commemorate it for ever. Such is the power of fair promises, vows, oaths and protestations.

In these circumstances it is also common to lie about one’s age, as widows usually do when they mean to marry again, and sometimes bachelors too:

Whose age has trembled to behold Its eighth five-year span.