The Anatomy of Melancholy

Many people acquire this malady by unknowingly eating certain foods, herbs or roots, such as henbane, nightshade, hemlock, mandrakes and so on. A group of young men in Agrigentum in Sicily entered a tavern, where they drank freely. Whether it was the wine itself or something mixed with it is still unknown.

But suddenly their brains became so disturbed, their imagination so deranged, that they thought they were in a ship at sea, about to be wrecked in a storm. To avoid shipwreck and immediate drowning, they therefore threw all the goods in the house out of the windows into the street—or into the sea, as they supposed.

They remained mad in this way for quite some time. When brought before the magistrate to account for their actions, they told him, still not recovered from their madness, that they had done it out of fear of death and to avoid imminent danger.

The onlookers were all astonished at their stupefaction and kept staring at them, while one of the oldest of the company knelt before the magistrate and solemnly excused himself: “O Tritons, I lay in the lowest part.” I beseech your divine majesties, and so on, for I was in the bottom of the ship all the time.

Another begged them, as so many sea gods, to be kind to them, and promised that if he and his companions ever reached land again, he would build an altar for their worship. The magistrate could not laugh enough at their madness; he told them to sleep it off and went on his way. Many such incidents often happen from these unknown causes.

Some cases are caused by love potions, wandering in the sun, the bite of a mad dog, a blow on the head, or the sting of the spider called the tarantula—a common thing in Calabria and Apulia in Italy, if we may believe Schenck, book 6, On Poisons; Cardano, On Subtlety, book 9; and Scaliger, exercise 185. Giovanni Pontano amusingly describes their symptoms in his dialogue Antonius: how they all dance together and are cured by music.

Cardano speaks of certain stones which, if carried on one’s person, cause melancholy and madness. He calls them unlucky, such as adamant, selenites and so on, which dry out the body, increase cares and lessen sleep. In his Persian History, Ctesias mentions a well in those regions: anyone who drinks from it is mad for twenty-four hours.

Some lose their wits at terrifying sights, as I have discussed more fully elsewhere, and often life itself: Hippolytus, frightened by Neptune’s sea-horses; Athamas, by Juno’s Furies. But these stories are common in all writers.

Here I could add other causes, and many more; But the beasts call, the sun declines: I must go.

Many such causes—much more could I say, But my cattle wait for their fodder; The sun declines, and I must be away.

Considered separately and occurring alone, these causes, I readily grant, can do little by themselves when rare or isolated—an old oak is not felled with a single blow—although often each one is fully sufficient.