The Anatomy of Melancholy

What with a lustful eye, a greedy tongue and a gambling hand, once they have foolishly impoverished themselves, mortgaged their wits along with their lands, and buried their ancestors’ fine possessions in their bowels, they may spend the rest of their days in prison, as they often do. They repent at leisure, and when everything is gone begin to be thrifty. But “economy comes too late at the bottom”: it is then too late to take stock. Their end is misery, sorrow, shame and discontent.

And well they deserve disgrace and discontent: “to be flogged in the amphitheatre,” as they were in ancient times by an edict of Emperor Hadrian, “squanderers of their own property,” as he calls them, prodigal fools, to be publicly shamed and hissed out of every gathering rather than pitied or relieved. The Tuscans and Boeotians brought their bankrupts into the marketplace on a bier, with an empty purse carried before them and all the boys following. There they sat all day, “with the people standing around,” exposed to disgrace and ridicule.

At Padua in Italy they have a stone called the Stone of Shame, near the Senate House, where spendthrifts and those who declare themselves unable to pay their debts sit with their backsides bare. This mark of disgrace is meant to frighten others away from such wasteful spending, or from borrowing more than they know how to repay. The civil lawyers of antiquity appointed guardians over such deranged spendthrifts, as they did over madmen, to control their expenses and prevent them from wasting their fortunes so recklessly as to ruin their families utterly.

I must not omit here those two great plagues and common obsessions of humankind, wine and women, which have made fools of countless people and robbed them of their senses. They commonly go together.

The man who indulges in wine, whom gambling ruins, Is rotten with lust—

Who has sorrow, says Solomon, Proverbs 23:39? Who has woe, but the man who loves drink? It causes torment—“racked by wine and anger”—and bitterness of mind, Sirach 31:21. Jeremiah calls it “wine of fury,” chapter 15: wine of madness, as well he may, for “it makes the sane go mad.” It makes healthy men sick and sad, and wise men mad, saying and doing they know not what.

“A terrible event happened today,” says Saint Augustine. Hear this dreadful occurrence: Cyrillus’s son, drunk today, “wickedly assaulted his pregnant mother, tried to rape his sister, almost killed his father, and mortally wounded two other sisters”; he would have raped his sister, killed his father, and so on.