The Anatomy of Melancholy

Once we become poor, we are transformed in an instant into base slaves, villains and wretched drudges. To be poor is to be a knave, a fool, a wretch, a wicked, hateful fellow, an eyesore to everyone: say “poor” and you have said it all. They are born to toil and misery, to carry burdens like beasts of burden, “to eat pounded dung” with Ulysses’ companions, and, as Chremylus objected in Aristophanes, “to lick salt”—lick salt; to empty privies, clean gutters, carry away dirt and dung, sweep chimneys, groom horses and so on.

I say nothing of the Turks’ galley slaves, bought and sold like beasts of burden, or those enslaved Black Africans, or the poor Indigenous labourers: “every day they succumb to carrying loads here and there; for everything that oxen and asses carry and draw among us is laid upon these wretched Indians,” and so on. They are ugly to look at; though formerly neat, they are now shabby and filthy because they are poor: “squalor naturally follows wretched circumstances.” It is generally so.

Others eat to live, but they live to drudge: “an enslaved and wretched people dares refuse nothing,” a servile race that dares refuse no task.

“Hey, Dromo, take this fan and make a breeze here while we wash.” Boy, fan us while we wash, and tell your fellow servant to rise early in the morning. Fair weather or foul, tomorrow he must run fifty miles on foot to carry a letter to my mistress. “Sosia, to the mill!” Sosia must stay home grinding malt all day; Tristan must thresh.

Such are their orders. Some of them are treated like footstools for rich men to tread on, mounting blocks to help them onto their horses, or walls for them to piss against. Commonly they are people like this: uncultivated, simple, superstitious fools, filthy, unclean, lousy, poor, downcast and servilely humble.

As Leo Africanus observes of the common people of Africa, “they are base by nature, and their rulers value them no more than if they were dogs”: base by nature and no more valued than dogs. “They lead a miserable, laborious, calamitous, destitute and unhappy life, more ignorant than asses, so that you would say they were plainly born of beasts”: no learning, no knowledge, no refinement, scarcely common sense, nothing but barbarism among them.

“They live like beasts and wear neither shoes nor clothes.” Like rogues and vagabonds, they go barefoot and barelegged, their soles as hard as horses’ hoofs, as Radziwiłł observed at Damietta in Egypt. They lead a laborious, miserable, wretched, unhappy life, like beasts and pack animals, if not worse—for a Spaniard in Yucatán sold three Indigenous boys for a cheese and a hundred enslaved Black people for a horse. Their talk is coarse abuse; their “highest good,” a pot of ale.