The Anatomy of Melancholy

Now to catch wild beasts in a snare, now to trick them with birdlime, And even surround the great woodland glades with dogs, Lay traps for birds, and set the thorn bushes alight.

Sometimes trick them with traps, with line and string Catch wild birds and beasts, surround The grove with dogs, and drive them from bushes with fire.

… And search out birds’ nests, and so forth.

Giocondo, in his preface to the works of Cato, Varro, Columella, and others that he edited, admits that he was immensely delighted by these agricultural studies and took extraordinary pleasure in them. If theory or contemplation can move us so much, what must the place and the activity itself, the practical part, do? I find the same admission in Herberstein, Porta, Camerarius, and many others who have written on the subject.

If my testimony were worth anything, I could say as much of myself: I am “truly Saturn.” No one ever took greater delight in springs, woods, groves, gardens, walks, fishponds, rivers, and the like. But—

Thirsty Tantalus reaches for the waters fleeing From his lips; And so do I. I may desire them, but I may not possess them.

Almost every palace and every city has its own walks, cloisters, terraces, groves, theatres, pageants, games, and other recreations; every country has established sports to cheer people’s minds and exercise their bodies. The Greeks had their Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean games in honour of Neptune, Jupiter, and Apollo; Athens had its own. Some competed for honour, garlands, or crowns, in beauty, dancing, running, and leaping, like our games for silver prizes.

The Romans had their feasts, as the Athenians and Spartans had their public banquets in the Prytaneum, at the Panathenaea, Thesperia, and Phiditia; plays; naumachiae, places for naval battles; theatres; and amphitheatres capable of holding seventy thousand people. There they presented various entertaining spectacles to cheer the people: gladiators; fights between men, between men and wild beasts, and between beasts themselves, like our bull-baiting and bear-baiting, which many country people and townspeople among us enjoy so much and so often attend; rope-dancers, jugglers, wrestlers, comedies, and tragedies, publicly presented at the emperor’s and the city’s expense, with incredible cost and magnificence.

In the Low Countries, as Van Meteren relates, before these wars they had many ceremonial feasts, plays, challenges, grounds for shooting practice, and associations of versifiers, rhetoricians, and poets. Such institutions are still carefully maintained in Amsterdam, as appears from Isaac Pontanus’s description in his History of Amsterdam, book 2, chapter 25. Likewise, not long ago at Friburg in Germany, as Neander’s account shows, they had “seven-year games,” ceremonial performances every seven years, which Bocerus, one of their own poets, elegantly described: