The Anatomy of Melancholy

according to that prediction of the Cumaean Sibyl. Whether its possessors are present or absent, near us or far away, this beauty shines and will draw people many miles to come and see it. Plato and Pythagoras left their country to see the wise Egyptian priests. Apollonius travelled into Ethiopia and Persia to consult the Magi, Brahmins and Gymnosophists.

The Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon; and many, says Jerome, travelled a thousand miles from Spain and distant places to see the eloquent Livy. “Many set out from Cadiz for Rome, not to see that most beautiful city or Octavian, master of the city and the world, but to visit and hear this one man.”

No beauty leaves such an impression, strikes so deeply or binds people’s souls more closely than virtue.

By the gods, no painter could, Nor any sculptor fashion Such beauty as virtue possesses.

No painter, engraver or carver can express virtue’s radiance, or the wonderful rays that come from it: those enchanting rays that make posterity fall in love, those everlasting rays that endure to the world’s end.

Many who loved and admired Alcibiades in his youth, says Favorinus, did not know or care for the grown man: “now, looking at him, they searched for Alcibiades.” But Socrates’ beauty remains the same. Virtue’s radiance never fades: it is always fresh and green, “ever living” for every succeeding age, and a most powerful lodestone to attract and unite those who are present. For this reason, perhaps, Homer imagines the three Graces linked hand in hand, because such graces unite human hearts so firmly.

“O sweet bonds,” Seneca exclaims, “which unite so happily that those bound by them love their binders, desiring to be bound still more tightly,” and, like so many Geryons, to be united into one.

For the nature of true friendship is to unite, to share the same feelings and be of one mind:

Both have the same wishes and refusals, and a mind content Throughout life—

as the poet says: always to remain one and the same. Where this love exists, there is peace and quiet, true mutual understanding, perfect friendship, a harmony of vows and wishes, the same opinions—as between David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Pylades and Orestes, Nisus and Euryalus, Theseus and Pirithous. They will live and die together and follow one kindness with another, “for they think it most shameful to be outdone in love.”

Not only while their friends are alive, but after their death, many ages later, they will still honour their memory—as Plato’s pupils did—with tombs and monuments, funeral songs, epitaphs, elegies, inscriptions, pyramids, obelisks, statues, images, pictures, histories, poems, annals, feasts and anniversaries, neglecting no kindness that might preserve their names, honours and everlasting memory.