The Anatomy of Melancholy

Lucian presents Jupiter complaining that Cupid would give him no peace, and the Moon lamenting how helplessly infatuated she was with Endymion. Even Venus herself confesses how badly her own son Cupid treated her, his mother: “Now dragging her to Mount Ida for love of the Trojan Anchises, now to Lebanon for the sake of that Assyrian youth. Although she threatened to break his bow and arrows and clip his wings, and even whipped his bare buttocks with her slipper, none of it worked: he was too headstrong and unruly.”

That conqueror of monsters, Hercules, was tamed by him:

The man whom a thousand beasts, the son of Sthenelus, And Juno could not conquer, Love conquered.

The man whom neither beasts nor enemies could tame, Nor Juno’s might subdue, was overcome by Love.

Your bravest soldiers and noblest spirits are weakened by it, “when they surrender to women’s blandishments and are defiled by their embraces.” Apollo, who undertook to cure every disease, could not cure himself of this one. Socrates therefore calls Love a tyrant and depicts him riding in triumph in a chariot. Petrarch imitates him in his Triumph of Love, and Fracastoro develops the picture in an elegant poem: Cupid rides, Mars and Apollo follow his chariot, Psyche weeps, and so forth.

Love’s sovereignty over plants can be demonstrated by many compelling proofs and familiar examples, especially palm trees. These are male and female, and display not merely a sympathetic affinity but a passion of love, confirmed by many observations.

The leaves live for love; every fruitful tree Loves in return. Palms nod their mutual pledges; Poplar sighs at poplar’s touch, Plane whispers to plane, and alder to alder.

Constantine, in On Agriculture, book 10, chapter 4, gives an example from Florentius’s Georgics of a palm tree that loved most ardently, “and would not be comforted until her beloved drew close to her. You could see the two trees bend and voluntarily stretch out their branches to embrace and kiss one another. They give unmistakable signs of mutual love.”

Ammianus Marcellinus, book 24, reports that they marry one another and fall in love if they grow within sight; when the wind carries their scent to one another, they are wonderfully moved. Philostratus, in his Images, observes the same, as does Galen in On the Affected Parts, book 6, chapter 5. They fall sick for love, ready to die and waste away. Farmers, noticing this, says Constantine, “stroke several palms growing together, and then stroke the lovesick palm in turn, carrying kisses from one to the other.”

Or they tie the leaves and branches of one to the trunk of the other, making both flourish and prosper much better. “They can tell which are in love by the bending of their branches and the leaning of their trunks.”