The Anatomy of Melancholy

As for the rest, as their fortunes are lowly, so their minds are correspondingly low, like beetles: “born from dung, fed from dung, delighting in dung.” As they were born and bred in obscurity, so they live and take pleasure in filth; it does not affect them so deeply. “They harbour narrow souls within narrow breasts.”

Indeed, no small part of their torment is that once they fall into distress, their companions abandon them; for the most part they are neglected and left to themselves, as poor Terence in Rome was by his great and noble friends Scipio, Laelius and Furius.

Publius Scipio did him no good, nor Laelius, nor Furius, Three men who then lived most comfortably in noble station; Through their help he did not even have a rented house.

It is generally so: “if the times turn cloudy, you will be alone.” He is left cold and comfortless; “no friend will come when wealth has been lost.” Everyone flees from him as from a rotten wall about to fall on their heads. Proverbs 19:4: “Poverty separates them from their neighbours.”

While fortune favours me, friends, you keep a friendly face; When it falls, you turn your faces away in shameful flight.

While fortune favoured me, friends, you smiled on me; But when she fled, no friend was there to see.

Worse still, if he is poor, everyone despises him, lords it over him, oppresses and mocks him, and makes his misery worse.

When a shaken house begins to sink, All the weight bears down upon the leaning parts.

Once the tottering house begins to sink, All the weight comes there as if by instinct.

Indeed, they are hateful to their own brothers and dearest friends. Proverbs 19:7: “His brothers hate him if he is poor.” “All his neighbours hate him”: his neighbours hate him, Proverbs 14:20. “Everyone, known and unknown to me, abandons me,” as the man complained in the comedy: friends and strangers all forsake me. Most grievously, poverty makes people ridiculous. “Unhappy poverty has no harder burden than this: it makes people objects of ridicule.”

They must endure the jokes, taunts, jeers and blows of their superiors, and take it all pleasantly to obtain a meal: “poverty, a great disgrace, commands one to do and endure anything.” He must become a parasite, a jester, a fool, “play the fool with fools,” as Euripides says, a slave, a wretch, a drudge to earn a poor living. He must adapt himself to everyone’s moods, win them over and please them, and still be struck when he has done it all, as Ulysses was by Melanthius in Homer; be abused, humiliated and lorded over, for “the folly of the powerful must be endured,” without so much as muttering against it.