The Anatomy of Melancholy

Let sailors learn astronomy, merchants’ agents study arithmetic, surveyors acquire geometry, spectacle-makers optics, wanderers geography, and town clerks rhetoric. What should a man do with a spade when he has no ground to dig, or they with learning when they have no use for it? That is how they reason, unashamed to let sailors, apprentices and the lowliest servants be better qualified than themselves. In former times, kings, princes and emperors were the foremost scholars, accomplished in every field.

Julius Caesar reformed the calendar and wrote his own Commentaries:

Even in the midst of battles he always found time For the regions of the stars and sky, and the powers above.

Antonius, Hadrian, Nero, Severus, Julian and others, the Emperor Michael and Isaac were so devoted to their studies that no lowly fellow would have taken so much trouble. Orion, Perseus, Alfonso and Ptolemy were famous astronomers; Sabor, Mithridates and Lysimachus admired physicians: Plato’s kings, all of them. Evax, that Arabian prince, was an expert in precious stones and an accomplished philosopher. The kings of Egypt in ancient times were priests, chosen from among them: “At once king of men and priest of Phoebus.”

But those heroic times are past. In this degenerate age the Muses are banished “to squalid little huts”, to people of lower station, and confined almost entirely to universities. In those days scholars were greatly loved, honoured and esteemed: old Ennius by Scipio Africanus, Virgil by Augustus, Horace by Maecenas. They were companions of princes, dear to them, as Anacreon was to Polycrates and Philoxenus to Dionysius, and richly rewarded.

Alexander sent the philosopher Xenocrates fifty talents because he was poor. “Men distinguished by their knowledge of affairs or their learning were once admitted to kings’ tables,” as Philostratus relates of Hadrian and Lampridius of Alexander Severus. Famous scholars came to these princes’ courts “as to a Lyceum”—as to a university—and were admitted to their tables, “as though reclining at the banquets of the gods”.

Archelaus, the Macedonian king, was reluctant to dine without Euripides. Among his other kindnesses, one evening at supper he drank to him and gave him a golden cup for his pains, “delighted by the poet’s charming conversation”. And it was fitting that this should be so, because, as Plato says well in his Protagoras, a good philosopher excels other men as much as a great king excels the common people of his country.

And again, “because they lack nothing and are least accustomed to want, they alone can rescue the disciplines they profess from contempt”. They had no need to beg so abjectly, as scholars in our times are compelled to complain of poverty or cringe before a rich boor for a meal. They could defend themselves and the arts they professed. Now they would do so, but cannot.