The Anatomy of Melancholy

One day the philosopher Amaranthus met his companions Hermocles, Diophantus, and Philolaus busily discussing the doctrines of Epicurus and Democritus, anxiously debating which was more plausible and nearer the truth. To draw them away from that ill-tempered controversy and refresh their spirits, he told them an amusing story about the physician Stratocles’s wedding, which he had just attended, with all its details: the company, food, music, and so forth. They were so delighted by his account that Philolaus blessed his heart and wished him many a good wedding and many such cheerful gatherings, so that he might please himself by seeing them and others by telling them about it.

News is generally welcome to all our ears: “we listen eagerly, for people’s ears delight in novelty,” as Pliny observes. We crave reports, eager to hear and listen to them: “the crowd, packed shoulder to shoulder, drinks it in with its ears.”

Most of us are too inquisitive and eager for news. Caesar remarks in his Commentaries that the ancient Gauls would question every carrier and traveller about what they had heard or seen, and what news there was from abroad:

… What is happening throughout the world, What the Chinese and Thracians are doing, the secrets of a stepmother And her boy, who is in love, and so forth.

Just as at a public dining-house, bakery, or barber’s shop among us. When the great Gonzalo, having incurred King Ferdinand’s displeasure, was confined to the city of Loja in Andalusia, his only comfort for easing his melancholy thoughts, says Giovio, was to hear news and follow everyday events, reports of which were brought to him “among the first,” by letter or otherwise, from the remotest parts of Europe.

Some people’s entire delight is to smoke tobacco and drink all day in a tavern or alehouse, talking, singing, joking, shouting, and telling cock-and-bull stories over a drink. Or, when three or four good companions meet, they tell old stories by the fireside or in the sunshine, as old people generally do, “things old men remember as they sit in the sun,” recalling with fresh pleasure old affairs and events that happened in their younger days. Other people’s favourite pastime is gambling; nothing pleases them so much.

One indulges in love; another is ruined by dice …

Many people object too scrupulously to cards, backgammon, dice, and other games combining skill and chance; Gataker refutes them well. Although these are innocent recreations in themselves, there may nevertheless be good grounds for objecting to them when they are abused, as they often are, and for forbidding them as most harmful things. Lemnius calls gaming “a mad and ruinous business.” For in most pastimes of this kind, it is not art or skill that carries everything off, but cunning, swindling, dishonesty, chance, and luck: it is “money on the move”—