The Anatomy of Melancholy

I will add only this: if whatever causes this jealous passion is rightly considered, whether it is justified or unjustified, well founded or groundless, true or false, it ought not to be taken so grievously. It is not so substantial or momentous a matter that it should inflict so deep a wound. It is a blow that does not hurt, a pain not physically felt, often founded on false suspicion alone and then nourished by a hostile interpretation.

If she is not unfaithful, he torments and wears himself down without cause. Or suppose the worst: he is a cuckold. It cannot be helped, and the more he stirs the matter up, the more he increases his own misery. How much better, in such a case, to conceal or disregard it! Why fear what cannot be remedied? “Many women have finally put it aside,” says Vives, “when they see that their husbands cannot be changed”: many women have grown calm when they see there is no remedy. And are men to be more jealous than women? In such a case there is some comfort in having companions,

It comforts the wretched to have companions in sorrow.

Who can say he is exempt? Who can assure himself he has not been one in the past, or protect himself for the future? If his case were unique, it would be hard; but since it is almost a universal misfortune, he should not take it so grievously. If a man has a lock that everyone else’s key will open as well as his own, why should he expect to reserve it for himself?

In some countries they think nothing of it. “Not even the nobles,” says Leo Africanus: in many parts of Africa no nobleman marries a virgin, if she is over fourteen, or has a chaste wife. It is so common that, just as the moon shows its horns to the world once a month, they give horns to their husbands at least as often.

And it is largely true, what that Caledonian lady, the wife of Argetocoxus, a British prince, told Julia Augusta when she rebuked her for unchastity: “We Britons at least misbehave with a few select men of the better sort; but you Roman women sleep with every low scoundrel. You are a company of common whores.”

In his time the emperor Severus made laws to restrain this vice; and, as Dio of Nicaea relates in his life, “three thousand adulterers”—three thousand makers of cuckolds, or “counterfeiters of nature’s coin,” as Philo calls them, false coiners and clippers of nature’s money—were summoned before the court at once. And yet,

The miller does not see all the water that flows by,

the miller does not see all the water that passes his mill. No doubt, as in our own days, these were ordinary people; the great were not all so much as called to account for it. Martial’s epigram, I suppose, might have been generally applied in those licentious times: “You alone possess everything,” and so on—your goods, lands, money and wits are your own—“but, Candidus, you share your wife with the public”: but, neighbour Candidus, your wife is common property.