The Anatomy of Melancholy

or a lack of money brings many tormentors: debts, dues, fees, dowries, jointures, and legacies to be paid, with annuities draining away their income. These leave them unable to maintain the splendour of their predecessors, or to educate and establish their children in occupations suited to their birth and rank; yet they refuse to bring their way of life down to match their present means.

Other troubles often combine to make the rest worse: ungrateful friends, impoverished friends, bad neighbours, negligent servants—thieving servants, slippery and cunning, who open things locked against them with a thousand keys, secretly pilfer, consume, and gorge themselves;

accidents, taxes, fines, costly offices, wasteful expenditure, entertaining, loss of stock, enmities, rivalries, frequent invitations, losses, standing surety, sickness, the death of friends, and that gulf which swallows everything: lack of foresight, bad management, disorder, and confusion. Through these their fortunes suddenly founder, and before they realise it they are plunged into an inescapable labyrinth of debts, cares, sorrows, want, grief, discontent, and melancholy itself.

I have finished with households, and will now briefly survey a few kinds and conditions of people. The world considers princes and great men the safest, happiest, most cheerful and merry of all, free from melancholy. But for their cares, miseries, suspicions, jealousies, discontents, folly, and madness, I refer you to Xenophon’s Tyrant, where King Hiero discusses this subject at length with the poet Simonides.

More than anyone else, they are troubled by perpetual fears and anxieties, so much so that, as the speaker in Valerius says, if you knew what cares and miseries were packed into this robe, you would not stoop to pick it up.

Or suppose they are secure and free from fear and discontent: even then they are too often without reason and rash in their actions. Read all our histories, the accounts fools have handed down about fools—our Iliads, Aeneids, and annals—and what is their subject? The passions of foolish kings and peoples.

Almost every page bears witness to their madness and fury, their rash and thoughtless actions over trifles, their folly: kings rave, and the Greeks are punished.

Next in rank, and next in misery, discontent, and every kind of reckless behaviour, come the great men. Far from Jupiter, far from the thunderbolt: the nearer, the worse. If they live at court, they rise and fall, ebb and flow with their prince’s favour. Their talent stands or falls with his expression: up today, down tomorrow. As Polybius describes them, they are like reckoning counters, gold today and silver tomorrow, worth whatever the person calculating chooses: now small coins, tomorrow thousands; now ahead of everyone, and a moment later behind.

They also torment one another with factions and rivalries: one is ambitious, another in love, a third in debt, a prodigal outrunning his fortune, a fourth distracted by cares and gaining nothing, and so on. For their discontents and anxieties, I refer you to Lucian’s treatise On Salaried Posts, Aeneas Sylvius, who calls them slaves of desire and folly, Agrippa, and many others.