The Anatomy of Melancholy

When her sweetheart came to town, Aretino’s Lucretia “wept on his breast, so that he would believe her tears were shed for joy at his return.” Quartilla in Petronius, when nothing else would move him, began to weep. As Baldassare Castiglione describes them: “To these crocodile tears they add sobs, burning sighs, a sorrowful expression, pallor and wasting. If you so much as venture outside, these fiends are ready to meet you at every turn, so slovenly and neglected in their dress, so downcast in their looks, as though they were about to die for your sake. How,” he asks, “is a young novice, beset like this, to escape?” But do not believe them.

Do not entrust your life to girls, For the waves are safer than a woman’s faith.

Perhaps her vows, tears, smiles and protestations make you think she is yours alone, that you possess her heart, hand and affection, when in fact nothing of the sort is true. As the Spanish Bawd said, “She delights in having one man in bed, another at the door, a third sighing at home”: one sweetheart in bed, another at the gate, a third sighing at home, a fourth, and so on. Every young man she sees and likes has as much of a claim, and will enjoy her as readily as you.

On the other hand, as I have said, men are just as false, for all their swearing, protesting and lying:

What they tell you, they have told a thousand girls.

Some of them love all those eleven thousand virgins at once, making each one believe he is besotted with her; or they love one until they see another, and then her alone, like Milo’s wife in Apuleius, book 2: “If she catches sight of a handsome young man, his beauty captivates her, and she turns her passion upon him.”

This is their usual form of courtship in such cases; they do not care what they swear, say or do. At one moment they slight the women, take no interest in them, abuse them outright and mock them; at the next, they will go mad, hang themselves, stab and kill if they cannot have them. Henceforth, therefore,

Let no woman trust a man who swears.

Let young women not believe them. These tricks and feigned passions are more common among women: “This day will end either my sorrow or my life; have pity on one who loves you,” said Phaedra to Hippolytus.

Joessa in Lucian told a young man, Pythius, to move him more deeply, that if he would not have her she was determined to kill herself. “There is a Nemesis, and you cannot help feeling grief and distress when you hear that I have hanged or drowned myself for your sake.”