The Anatomy of Melancholy

So were the Venetians when their forces were defeated by Louis, king of France. The kings of France and Spain, the pope and the emperor had all conspired against them at Cambrai, and the French herald declared open war in the Senate: “Loredan, doge of the Venetians,” and so on. They had lost Padua, Brescia, Verona, Friuli and their mainland territories, and now had nothing left but the city of Venice itself; “and they thought they must fear for the city itself,” says Bembo. The loss of that too was to be feared: “so great a grief suddenly seized them all as never before,” and so on. They were plunged into pitiful misery, never before in such lamentable distress.

In 1527, when Rome was sacked by Bourbon, the common soldiers made such havoc that beautiful churches were turned into stables, ancient records and books used as bedding for horses or burned like straw; relics and costly pictures were defaced, altars demolished, rich hangings, carpets and so on trampled into the dirt.

Their wives and loveliest daughters were raped by every base scoundrel, as Sejanus’s daughter was by the executioner, publicly, before their fathers’ and husbands’ eyes. The daughters of noblemen and the wealthiest citizens, intended for princes’ beds, were handed over to any common soldier and kept as concubines.

Senators and cardinals themselves were dragged through the streets and subjected to agonising torture to make them reveal where their money was hidden. The rest, murdered in heaps, lay stinking in the streets; infants’ brains were dashed out before their mothers’ eyes. It was a lamentable sight to see so splendid a city so suddenly ruined, and rich citizens who had formerly lived amid every pleasure sent begging to Venice, Naples, Ancona and elsewhere.

Those proud palaces that just now boasted their summits up to heaven were cast down as low as hell in an instant. Whom would such misery not make discontented?

Terence the poet drowned himself, some say, because of the loss of his comedies in a shipwreck. When a poor man has gone hungry through many meals and scraped together a small sum, only to lose it in an instant; when a scholar has spent many hours studying to no purpose, his labours lost, and so on—how could it be otherwise?

I may conclude with Gregory: “As deeply as love of worldly things moves us while possession lasts, so fiercely does grief burn when it is taken away.” Riches do not give us as much joy in possessing them as they torment us when they are lost.

Next to sorrow I may also place those events that bring on fear. Besides the terrors I have already touched on, and many other fears, which are infinite, there is superstitious fear, one of the three great causes of fear in Aristotle, commonly aroused by portents and ominous events, which greatly trouble many of us. (“My mind forebodes some evil, I know not what.”)