The Anatomy of Melancholy

Not only fire and water, goods and lands, “but life itself depends on the nod of a most insolent conqueror.” Such is their slavery: their lives and souls depend on his arrogant will and command. He is a tyrant who ruins everything wherever he goes, so that a historian complains: “If a former inhabitant saw these places now, he would not recognise them; if a traveller or stranger saw them, his heart would grieve at the sight.”

Where, as Aristotle observes, “new exactions, new burdens are imposed,” new demands and burdens fall on people every day—like those described by Zosimus in book 2, so grievous “that husbands prostituted their wives and fathers their children to pay the collectors from the earnings,” and so on—they must be discontented. “Hence the groans and weeping of cities,” as Cicero says: hence those complaints and tears of cities, and “poor, miserable, rebellious, and desperate subjects,” as Hippolytus adds.

And as a discerning countryman of ours observed not long ago in his survey of the great Duchy of Tuscany, the people lived in deep grievance and discontent, as their many open complaints made clear. “The state was like a sick body that had recently taken medicine, whose humours had not yet settled properly, and which had been so weakened by purging that nothing was left but melancholy.”

Where rulers and potentates are unrestrained in lust, hypocrites, pleasure-seekers, religious only in appearance—“What is more fragile than hypocrisy?” What is so brittle and insecure? What more quickly overthrows their power than their roaming, raging desires for their subjects’ wives and daughters, to say nothing worse? Those who should “carry the torch before others,” leading the way in every virtuous action, often lead them instead into every kind of wrongdoing and debauchery, bringing calamity upon their countries.

“And they themselves are often ruined, banished, or murdered through a conspiracy of their subjects,” as were Sardanapalus, Dionysius the Younger, Elagabalus, Periander, Peisistratus, Tarquin, Timocrates, Childeric, Appius Claudius, Andronicus, Galeazzo Sforza, Alessandro de’ Medici, and others.

Where rulers or great men are malicious, envious, factional, ambitious rivals, they tear a commonwealth apart. Like so many Guelphs and Ghibellines, they disturb its peace and, by killing one another, let it bleed to death. Our histories are all too full of such barbarous cruelties and the miseries that follow them.

Where they are like so many horse-leeches, hungry, grasping, corrupt, greedy, “slaves to avarice,” ravenous as wolves—for, as Cicero writes, “Whoever governs benefits others, and whoever tends cattle should serve their welfare”—or where they put private advantage before the public good. For, as was said long ago, “Private interests always obstruct public ones.”