The Anatomy of Melancholy

SECTION 2 MEMBER 1, SUBSECTION 1 Love melancholy: its ancestry, power and reach.

In the preceding section, among other pleasing objects, we mentioned the grace and beauty of women that causes “heroical,” or love, melancholy. It stands above the other kinds and is properly called Love. The part affected in men is the liver. It is called “heroical” because gallants, noblemen and the noblest spirits are commonly possessed by it.

Its power and reach are very great. In that twofold division of love into “affection” and “erotic desire”—those two Venuses mentioned by Plato and others—it is the foremost, called Venus “in the pre-eminent sense,” as I have said, or Love itself. Although named with reference to human beings, and most evident in them, it extends to plants, sentient creatures and those incorporeal beings to be described below, exercising a wide dominion over them.

Love’s ancestry is very ancient, reaching back to the beginning of the world, as Phaedrus argues. His parentage is so old that no poet could ever discover it. Hesiod makes Earth and Chaos Love’s parents, before the gods were born:

Before all the gods, she first brought forth Love.

Some think Love is the very fire Prometheus brought from heaven. Plutarch, in his little work on love, makes Love the son of Iris and the West Wind. But Socrates, in that delightful dialogue of Plato, when his turn came to speak about love—a subject just introduced by Agathon the rhetorician, “grandiloquent Agathon,” that singer Agathon—tells this tale in a poetic vein:

When Venus was born, all the gods were invited to a banquet, among them Porus, the god of abundance and wealth. Penia, or Poverty, came begging at the door. Porus, thoroughly drunk on nectar—for there was no wine in those days—was walking in Jupiter’s garden when he met Penia in a bower. In his drunkenness he made her pregnant, and she gave birth to Love. Because he was conceived on Venus’s birthday, Venus always attends upon him. Ficino gives the moral interpretation of this story.

Another tale there is borrowed from Aristophanes. At the beginning of the world, human beings had four arms and four feet. But because they proudly compared themselves with the gods, they were divided into halves; now, perhaps, they hope through love to be reunited and made one.

Or the story runs this way: Vulcan met two lovers and told them to ask for whatever they wished, and they would have it. They answered, “O Vulcan, smith of the gods,” and so on: “O Vulcan, the gods’ great smith, we beg you to forge us anew in your furnace and make us one instead of two.” He immediately did so; ever since, true lovers are either wholly one or desire to be united. You will find many such tales, with their moral interpretations, in the third dialogue of Leone Ebreo.