The Anatomy of Melancholy

In great Cairo in Egypt, as Radziwiłł observes, a hundred thousand courtesans are tolerated, besides boys. How many there are in Fez, Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice and elsewhere! And many other provinces and cities of Europe still do the same, because they think young men—including churchmen and servants—can scarcely live chastely.

Perhaps this consideration led Vibius the Spaniard, when his friend Crassus, that wealthy Roman gentleman, was hiding in the cave, “to provide an abundance of the pleasure that his age desired”: to oblige him still further, he sent two vigorous young women to keep him company throughout his confinement there.

And it led Surena, the Parthian general, when he fought the Romans, to take two hundred concubines about with him, as Swiss soldiers now commonly take their wives.

But since this course is not generally approved, and is rather opposed and abhorred as unlawful, most countries strongly encourage marriage, greatly reward those with many children, and fine those who refuse to marry: “the privilege of three children.” And in Aulus Gellius, book 2, chapter 15, Aelian, book 6, chapter 5, and Valerius, book 1, chapter 9, we read that three children freed their father from burdensome offices, and five from all public contributions.

“A woman shall be saved by bearing children.” Epictetus would have everyone marry; and Plato, in book 6 of the Laws, requires that a man who has not married before the age of thirty-five be compelled and punished, and the money dedicated to Juno’s temple or applied to public purposes.

In some countries they consider a man who dies without a wife unfortunate—a most unhappy man, as Boethius infers; and, if happy at all, still “fortunate in misfortune,” unhappy in his supposed happiness. They commonly deplore his condition and lament him deeply for it: “Oh, my sweet son,” and so on. See Lucian, On Mourning, and Sandys, folio 83, and so forth.

Yet many among us take the opposite side. They are married themselves; as for others, let them burn, blaze and flame—they do not care, so long as they are not troubled by them.

Some are too fastidious, and some too covetous. They have the capacity and means to marry whenever they wish, but are so particular that they demand the choice offered to the emperor Theophilus, whose mother Euphrosyne presented all the rarest beauties of the empire together in the great chamber of his palace and told him to give a golden apple to the woman he liked best. If they could thus pick whomever they pleased from all the beautiful maidens their nation affords, they might perhaps consent to marry; otherwise—and so on.

“Why should a man marry?” asks another Epicurean crowd. “What is matrimony but a matter of money? Why should free nature be encroached upon, confined or bound to this man or that woman with these shackles upon body and property?” And so on.