The Anatomy of Melancholy

“The sky bellows with an unfamiliar clash.” They care nothing for the harm they cause, provided they enrich themselves for the moment. They will keep fanning the embers of conflict until the whole world burns. The siege of Troy lasted ten years and eight months: 870,000 Greeks and 670,000 Trojans died; at the city’s capture and afterwards, 276,000 men, women, and children of every kind were killed. Caesar killed a million; the Ottoman ruler Mehmed II, 300,000.

Sicinius Dentatus fought in a hundred battles, won eight single combats, received forty wounds on the front of his body, earned 140 crowns, and triumphed nine times for his service. Marcus Sergius suffered thirty-two wounds; the centurion Scaeva, I do not know how many. Every nation has its Hectors, Scipios, Caesars, and Alexanders. Our Edward IV fought on foot in twenty-six battles. Like all of them, he glories in it, and the story is told to his honour. At the siege of Jerusalem, 1,100,000 died by the sword and famine. At Cannae, 70,000 were killed, as Polybius records, and as many at our battle of Albye. Fighting from dawn to dusk is nothing new: Constantine and Licinius did so, and others.

At the siege of Ostend—the devil’s academy—a comparatively insignificant town, a small fort but a great grave, 120,000 men died, besides whole towns, villages, and hospitals full of maimed soldiers. There were siege engines, explosive devices, and every instrument of harm the devil could devise; 2,500,000 iron cannonballs weighing forty pounds were fired, and three or four million in gold spent. Who, my author asks, can be astonished enough at the stony hearts, stubbornness, fury, and blindness of those who risk poor soldiers’ lives without any prospect of success and pitilessly lead them to slaughter? This may rightly be called the rage of furious beasts rushing senselessly to their own deaths.

“What evil spirit, what fury, what plague,” and so on—what plague, what fury first put so devilish and brutish a thing as war into human minds? Who made so gentle and peaceable a creature, born for love, mercy, and meekness, rave and rage like beasts and rush to its own destruction? How nature might reproach humankind: “I fashioned you a divine creature,” and so on. I made you harmless, peaceful, divine. How God and every good person might remonstrate!

Yet, as one writer laments, “it is only their deeds that people admire, and they count them among the heroes.” These are the brave spirits, the gallants of the world. They alone are admired and triumph; statues, crowns, pyramids, and obelisks perpetuate their fame. The spirit of immortality attends them: “this is the way to the stars.” When Rhodes was besieged, “the city’s ditches were filled with corpses”—the ditches were full of dead bodies. And when the same Ottoman ruler Suleiman besieged Vienna, the bodies lay level with the tops of the walls.