The Anatomy of Melancholy

As for poets, rhetoricians, historians, philosophers, mathematicians, logicians, and so on, they are like grasshoppers: they must sing in summer and waste away in winter, for there is no advancement for them. They were just the same from the beginning, if you believe that delightful tale Socrates told the handsome Phaedrus beneath a plane tree on the banks of the Ilissus. It was about noon, the day was hot, and the grasshoppers were making a noise. He took that pleasant opportunity to tell how grasshoppers had once been scholars, musicians, poets and the like, before the Muses were born. They lived without food or drink, and for that reason Jupiter turned them into grasshoppers.

And they may be turned again “into Tithonus’s cicadas or the Lycians’ frogs,” for all the reward I can see them likely to receive. Or else, meanwhile, I wish they could live as those creatures did, without any provisions, like so many manucodiatae—those Indian birds we commonly call birds of paradise. I mean the ones that live on air and the dew of heaven and need no other food.

As things stand, their rhetoric serves only to curse their bad luck. Many, for lack of money, are driven to desperate expedients. From grasshoppers they turn into bumblebees and wasps, outright parasites; they make the Muses into mules to fill their starving bellies and obtain a meal.

To tell the truth, the usual lot of most scholars is servility and poverty: they complain pitifully and display their needs to unheeding patrons, as Cardano does, and Xylander, and many others. As happens all too often in dedicatory letters, the hope of gain makes them lie and flatter, magnifying and extolling an unlearned, unworthy fool for his excellent virtues with extravagant praises and compliments. As Machiavelli observes, they should instead denounce and abuse him outright for his notorious crimes and vices.

So they sell themselves like fiddlers or tradesmen working for pay, to serve the purposes of great men for a small reward. They are like Indians: they possess abundant gold but do not know its value. For I share Synesius’s opinion that King Hiero gained more from knowing Simonides than Simonides gained from knowing him. Great men receive their best education, sound instruction and all their accomplishments from us; when they do well, their honour and immortality also come from us. We are their living tombs and records, the trumpeters of their fame. What was Achilles without Homer? Alexander without Arrian and Curtius? Who would have known the Caesars but for Suetonius and Dio?

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, But all lie unwept and unknown, Pressed beneath the long night, Because they lack a sacred poet.