The Anatomy of Melancholy

Democritus, as Hippocrates and Diogenes Laertius describe him, was a small, withered old man, very melancholy by temperament, averse to company in his later days and much inclined to solitude. A famous philosopher in his time and a contemporary of Socrates, he devoted himself entirely, towards the end, to his studies and a private life. He wrote many excellent works. He was a great theologian, according to the theology of those times, an expert physician, a student of politics, and an excellent mathematician, as his Diacosmus and other works testify.

He took great pleasure in the study of agriculture, Columella says; and I often find him quoted by Constantinus and other writers on that subject. He knew the natures and differences of all animals, plants, fish, and birds; some say he could understand their songs and cries. In a word, he was “learned in every field”, a scholar of wide learning and a devoted student. Some relate that, to contemplate more effectively, he put out his eyes and chose blindness in old age; yet he saw more than all the rest of Greece, and wrote on every subject: “There was nothing in the whole fabric of nature about which he did not write.”

He was a man of outstanding intelligence and deep thought. To improve his knowledge when young, he travelled to Egypt and Athens to converse with learned men, admired by some and despised by others. After a wandering life, he settled at Abdera, a town in Thrace. Some say he was summoned there to be its lawgiver, recorder, or town clerk; others say that he was born and brought up there. Whatever the truth, he eventually lived in a garden outside the town, devoting himself entirely to his studies and a private life, except that he sometimes walked down to the harbour and laughed heartily at the variety of ridiculous sights he saw there. Such was Democritus.

But meanwhile, how does this concern me? What connection gives me the right to assume his costume? I admit that, on the strength of what I have said so far, comparing myself with him would be both impudent and arrogant. I do not presume to set myself beside him: “He surpasses me three hundred thousandfold”; “I am small, I am nothing; I neither aspire to heights nor hope for them.” Yet I will say this much about myself, hopefully without any suspicion of pride or conceit: I have lived a quiet, sedentary, solitary, private life, “for myself and the Muses,” at the university almost as long as Xenocrates in Athens, “nearly to old age,” seeking wisdom as he did and shut up in my study most of the time.