The Anatomy of Melancholy

A thousand kisses sound; their arms grow pale in the embrace, And, stretching out their arms, they clasp each other’s necks.

Inachus and Pincus—and how many rivers in love could I list, which beauty has enslaved! All this while I say nothing of idols themselves that have committed idolatry of this kind, or of mirrors that have been carried away by love, if you will believe the poets, when their ladies and mistresses looked into them to dress.

Though I have no feeling, your charm gives me Feeling, and I feel the burden of burning love. Whenever you turn your watching eyes this way, flames Set my wounded limbs ablaze, helpless as I am.

Though I have no power of feeling, Your sweet looks give me life and save me; And when your speaking eyes turn this way, My wounded limbs seem to live and burn.

I could tell you another such story of a spindle set on fire by a beautiful lady’s looks—or her fingers, some say; I am not quite sure which. But it caught fire, according to the report. And there is the story of a cold bath that suddenly steamed and grew very hot when naked Caelia entered it:

We wonder what this great cloud of steam is, and where it comes from, and so on.

But of all stories of this kind, the most memorable concerns Death himself: when he ought to have struck a sweet young maiden with his dart, he fell in love with the person before him. I could relate many more such stories, which must be believed with a poet’s faith.

Thus speechless and lifeless things fall foolishly in love; but human beings go mad, often stupefied at the first sight of beauty, struck dumb like the fisherman in Aristaenetus who caught sight of a girl bathing by the sea:

All my limbs went slack—— From head to heel, and all awareness left My heart: such immense astonishment seized my mind.

And Lucian, in his Portraits, confesses of himself that in his mistress’s presence he was bereft of all feeling and unable to move, as if he had seen a Gorgon’s head. This was no such savage monster, as Coelius interprets it in book 3, chapter 9, but the very essence of beauty, some lovely creature—as the poet doubtless meant when he first invented it—at which spectators stood astonished.

“Wretched are those for whom you shine, as yet untried”: the poor creatures are driven by the very sight of her captivating looks to go mad or kill themselves.

They await the verdict of her scornful eyes; The one she favours lives, the other dies.

Heliodorus, in book 1, presents Thyamis almost beside himself when he first saw Chariclea, not daring to look at her a second time, for he thought it impossible for any living man to see her and control himself.

The mere fame of beauty will draw them to it from many miles away—such is this magnet’s power of attraction—and the miles will seem short. They will undertake any labour or hardship, any long journey. Neither Penia nor Atalanta will outstrip them through seas, deserts, mountains and dangerous places, as people travelled to gaze at Psyche: many mortal men came from far and near to see that glorious spectacle of her age. Paris came for Helen, and Coroebus to Troy: