The Anatomy of Melancholy

What amusement would your honour like? Falconry, hunting, fishing, fowling, bull-baiting, bear-baiting, cards, dice, cockfighting, actors, acrobats, fiddlers, jesters and so on: all are at your worship’s command. Fine houses, gardens, orchards, terraces, galleries, private rooms, pleasant walks and delightful places are ready to hand.

“Milk in golden vessels, wine in silver ones, beautiful young women at a nod”: wine, women and so forth, a Turkish paradise, a heaven on earth. Though he is a foolish, feeble fellow with scarcely any common sense, if he is born to wealth, as I have said, “he is commanded to be wise by hereditary right.” He must have honour and office in his turn. “No one but a rich man deserves honour,” Ambrose, On Duties, chapter 21: no one is as worthy as he is. He shall have it: “be whatever Servius or Labeo was.”

Get enough money and command kingdoms, provinces, armies, hearts, hands and affections. You will have popes and patriarchs as your chaplains and parasites; like Tamerlane, kings to draw your coach, queens to do your washing and emperors as your footstools. Build more towns and cities than Alexander the Great, towers of Babel, pyramids and monumental tombs. Command heaven and earth and tell the world it is your vassal: “Gold buys a crown; silver opens heaven; a denarius hires a philosopher; a coin compels the law; an obol feeds a scholar; metal secures health; bronze binds friends together.”

So it was not without good reason that Giovanni de’ Medici, that rich Florentine, lying on his deathbed, summoned his sons Cosimo and Lorenzo and, among other sober sayings, repeated this: “I depart with a peaceful mind, because I shall leave you healthy and rich.” Though I am dying, it does me good to think that I shall leave you, my children, healthy and rich. For wealth rules everything.

With us it is not as it was with Lycurgus’s Spartan senators in Plutarch. The man most deserving, most virtuous and worthy of the position was advanced. Speed, strength, wealth or friends did not win it in those days, but “the best among the best, the most self-controlled among the self-controlled”: the most temperate and best. We have aristocracies only in theory; in practice, all are oligarchies, in which a few rich men lord it over others, do as they please and enjoy privileges because of their greatness.

They may offend freely and do as they please. No one dares accuse them, or even mutter against them. No notice is taken; they can act with impunity, live by their own laws and, for their money, obtain pardons and indulgences and redeem their souls from purgatory and hell itself: “the money chest holds Jupiter shut within it.” Let them be Epicureans or atheists, libertines or Machiavellians, as they often are—