The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Among the other honours decreed to Caesar,” as Suetonius, chapter 52 of Julius, and Dio, book 44, relate, “he was granted the right to unite himself with any women whatsoever.” Every particular history will supply a variety of such examples: men otherwise good, wise, prudent, virtuous and brave, but all too culpable in this.

Priam had fifty sons, but only seventeen were lawfully begotten. Philip the Good left fourteen illegitimate children. Lorenzo de’ Medici was a good and wise prince, but, says Machiavelli, monstrously lustful. No one was as brave as Castruccio Castracani; yet, according to the same author, no one was as sexually unrestrained.

Nor does this fault prevail only among the great: if you accept a great man’s testimony, it is familiar to every common soldier in France, and elsewhere too, I think. “This vice,” says my author, “is so common among us in France that a man who is not a notorious whoremonger is held of no account, a mere coward, unworthy of the name of soldier.” In Italy, a man is no gentleman unless, besides his wife, he has a courtesan and a mistress.

It is no wonder, then, that poor women are jealous in such circumstances, when they see themselves openly neglected, despised, loathed and mistreated; their unfaithful husbands entertaining others in their place, often courting ladies before their faces; other men’s wives wearing their jewels. How can a poor woman in such a situation moderate her passion?

What do you feel now, Dido, as you witness such things?

On the other hand, how can a poor man keep himself from this deadly malady when he sees such obvious signs of his wife’s inconstancy? When, like Milo’s wife, she dotes on every young man she sees, or, like Martial’s Sota, “abandons her husband and follows Clitus.”

Although her husband is handsome and tall, fair and lovely to behold, able to satisfy any one woman, she will still taste the forbidden fruit. She is Juvenal’s Iberina to the very hair: she is as content with one eye as with one man.

If a young gallant happens to enter her presence—a Fastidious Brisk who can dress fashionably, with a lovelock, jingling spur and feather, who can bow and pay compliments and court a gentlewoman—she raves about him: “Oh, what a lovely, handsome man he was!” Another Hector, an Alexander, a splendid man, a demigod! How charmingly he bore himself, with what graceful dignity: “That was how he moved his eyes, his hands, his face.” How elegantly he wore his clothes!

How noble his bearing, how brave his heart and arms!

How splendidly he talked, rode, sang and danced, and so on! Then she begins to loathe her husband, “kisses him reluctantly,” hates him and his filthy beard and goatish appearance. As Doris said of Polyphemus, “He reeks all over of pus, all over like a he-goat”: a rank, disgusting fellow, a goblin-faced fellow; he smells, he stinks,

And belches onions and garlic together—

“If ever he comes to the bedchamber,” and so forth—how like a simpleton, a fool, an ass he looks; how like a boor he behaves! She will not come near him willingly, but rejects him altogether, as Venus did her soot-blackened Vulcan, until at last,