The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Believe me,” says one writer, “it will be sweet to die in the study of the mathematical arts.” I could live and die with such reflections, and find more delight and true contentment of mind in them than you find in all your wealth and amusements, however rich you may be. And Cardano aptly supports me: “It is more honourable and glorious to understand these things than to govern provinces, or to be a handsome or wealthy young man.”

All other studies give a similar pleasure to those truly devoted to them: “such sweetness,” one writer holds, “that once someone has tasted them, as though enchanted by Circe’s cups, he can never be torn away.” The same sweetness bewitches a student like Circe’s cup, so that he cannot stop. The many laborious hours, days, and nights spent on the vast treatises they write bear witness to that same contentment.

Julius Caesar Scaliger was so moved by poetry that he burst into a passionate declaration: he would rather have written twelve verses in Lucan, or a certain ode of Horace, than be emperor of Germany.

Nicholas Gerbelius, that good old man, was so transported by a few Greek authors restored to the light, and by the hope and desire of enjoying the rest, that he immediately exclaimed, “We shall be richer than all the Arabs and Indians.” We shall be richer than all the Arabian or Indian princes: so highly did he prize them, as things of incomparable worth and value.

Seneca prefers Zeno and Chrysippus, two doting Stoics—he was so enamoured of their works—to any prince or army commander. And Orontius the mathematician so admires Archimedes that he calls him “divine and greater than a human being”: a little god, more than a man. So he well might, as far as I can see, if fame or worth is the measure.

Pindar of Thebes is as renowned for his poems as his fellow citizens Epaminondas, Pelopidas, Hercules, or Bacchus are for their warlike deeds. “And if you consider fame, no fewer people remember Aristotle than Alexander,” as Cardano observes. Aristotle is better known than Alexander: we have only an account of Alexander’s deeds, but Aristotle “lives entire in his writings”—he is wholly present in his works. Yet I do not insist on this. Delight is what I am aiming at: such great pleasure, such sweet contentment lies in study.

When King James visited our University of Oxford in 1605, and, among its other buildings, went to see that famous library restored by Sir Thomas Bodley, he imitated Alexander and, on leaving, burst into this noble declaration: “If I were not a king, I would be a university man. And if I had to be a prisoner, if I could have my wish, I would ask for no other prison than that library, and to be chained together with so many good authors,” and with “dead teachers.”