The Anatomy of Melancholy

They are always lying and wheedling, embracing, doffing their caps, bowing and scraping, applauding, flattering, smiling ingratiatingly, visiting and waiting at people’s doors, all affability, feigned integrity and humility. If that will not do—if once this disposition possesses his thirsty soul, as Cyprian describes it, “when the brine of ambition possesses a soul eager to drink”—he will gain his object by hook or by crook. He will climb from his hole to every honour and office, if he can get up at all: flattering one person, bribing another, leaving no means untried to win everything.

It is astonishing how slavishly such men submit to every subordinate when pursuing a petition: the pains they take, running, riding, calculating, plotting, counterplotting, protesting and swearing, vowing and promising; the labours they undergo, up early and down late. How obliging and affable, how friendly and courteous they are; how they grin and smile ingratiatingly at everyone they meet! With all their feasts and invitations, they exhaust themselves and their fortunes in seeking what they would often be much better without, as the orator Cineas told Pyrrhus.

What sleepless nights, painful hours, anxious thoughts and bitterness of mind consume the time they spend waiting, distracted and exhausted “between hope and fear”! There can be no greater present torment. If they do obtain the object of their petition, sought at such expense and with such anxiety, they are still not free. Their anxiety must begin again, for they are never satisfied: “they breathe nothing but power.” Their thoughts, actions and efforts are all directed towards sovereignty and honour.

Like Ludovico Sforza, that swaggering Duke of Milan, a man of exceptional wisdom but deep ambition, born to his own destruction and Italy’s, they will struggle on even at the cost of their own ruin and their friends’ undoing. They cannot stop. Like a dog in a wheel, a bird in a cage or a squirrel on a chain—Budé’s comparisons—they climb and climb with great effort, but never finish, never reach the top.

A knight would become a baronet, then a lord, then a viscount, then an earl, and so on; a doctor, a dean, then a bishop; from tribune to praetor, from bailiff to mayor: first this office, then that. Like Pyrrhus in Plutarch, they must first have Greece, then Africa, then Asia. They swell like Aesop’s frog until at last they burst, or come down with Sejanus “to the Gemonian Steps” and break their own necks.

Or they are like Evangelus the piper in Lucian, who blew his pipe until he fell down dead. If the ambitious man happens to fail and suffer a rebuff, he finds a hell on the other side: so dejected that he is ready to hang himself, become a heretic, a Muslim or a traitor in an instant. Enraged against his enemies, he rails, swears, fights, slanders, disparages, envies and murders.