The Anatomy of Melancholy

It cannot be repealed. We are all mortal, and these all-commanding gods and princes die like other men: “Death envelops the lowly and the exalted head alike, and makes the lowest equal to the highest.” “Oh, the frailty of the human condition!” Sylvius exclaims. Ladislaus, king of Bohemia, eighteen years old and in the flower of youth, so powerful, rich, fortunate and happy, surrounded by all his friends and so many physicians, about to be married, fell ill and died within thirty-six hours.

So all of us must leave sooner or later. As Calliopeius in the comedy took leave of his spectators and listeners:

Farewell, and applaud. I, Calliopeius, have revised the text.

So must we bid the world farewell—“Exit Calliopeius”—and, having played our parts, depart for ever. Tombs and monuments share that fate: “Even tombs themselves have been assigned their doom.” Kingdoms, provinces, towns and cities have their allotted terms, and perish.

When Troy flourished, Mycenae was the finest city in Greece and “ruled over all Greece.” But alas, it and Assyrian Nineveh have been utterly overthrown. The same fate has befallen Thebes in Egypt and Thebes in Boeotia, and Delos, “the common meeting-place of Greece,” the common council-house of Greece. Babylon, the greatest city the sun ever shone upon, has nothing left now but walls and rubble.

What remains of Pandion’s Athens but its name?

So Pausanias lamented in his day. And where now are Troy itself, Persepolis, Carthage, Cyzicus, Sparta, Argos and all those Greek cities? Syracuse and Agrigentum, the finest cities in Sicily, which once had seven hundred thousand inhabitants, are now decayed. Of those vast populations, only names such as Hiero and Empedocles remain. Among the Scythians, a single Anacharsis is remembered. The world itself must come to an end, and every part of it.

“Other cities, then, are mortal,” as Pierre Gilles concludes of Constantinople, “but this one seems to me destined for immortality, for as long as human beings exist.” Yet it is not so. Neither situation nor strength, neither sea nor land, can protect a city: it and everything else must finally vanish. As great mountains seem flat to a traveller far away, and at last disappear from view altogether, so cities, people and monuments decay. “Nor does the solid earth gain protection from its own structure.” Only names remain; in time these too are forgotten and wrapped in everlasting night.

“Returning from Asia, as I sailed from Aegina towards Megara,” says Servius Sulpicius in a letter of consolation to Cicero, “I began to look at the surrounding country. Aegina lay behind me, Megara ahead, Piraeus on the right and Corinth on the left. What flourishing cities they once were, now lying ruined and overwhelmed before my eyes! I began to think: alas, why are we so disturbed by the death of a friend, whose life is much shorter, when so many splendid cities lie buried before us? Remember, Servius, that you are human. This thought greatly strengthened me, and I corrected myself.”