The Anatomy of Melancholy

No tongue can adequately tell it. Every history is full of the insatiable lust of men and women—Nero, Elagabalus, Bonosus and the rest. “Caelius was desperately in love with Amphilenus, but Quintius with Amphilena,” and so forth. They neigh after other men’s wives like well-fed horses, as Jeremiah 5.8 complains, or roam like communal breeding bulls, “ravishers of virgins and widows,” as many of our great men do.

Solomon’s wisdom was extinguished in this fire of lust; Samson’s strength was weakened; piety was entirely forgotten by Lot’s daughters, priestly dignity by Eli’s sons, the reverence due to old age by the elders who wanted to violate Susanna, filial duty by Absalom towards his stepmother, and brotherly love by Amnon towards his sister.

Human and divine laws, commandments, exhortations, fear of God and men, fair means or foul, reputation, wealth, shame, disgrace and honour cannot oppose, ward off or withstand its fury: “Love conquers all,” and so forth.

No cord or cable can pull so powerfully or hold so firmly as love can with a twisted thread. The scorching rays beneath the equator, or the extreme cold within the Arctic Circle, where the very seas freeze—neither the cold nor the torrid zone can avert or expel this heat, fury and rage of mortal men.

Where are you fleeing, madman? There is no escape. Though you flee As far as the Tanais, Love will follow you all the way.

What country, what village does not complain of women’s unnatural, insatiable lust? Mother and daughter sometimes dote on the same man; father and son, master and servant, on one woman.

But love, but unbridled lust— What chaste thing on earth has it left unassailed?

What broken vows and oaths, what fury, infatuation and madness might I list? Yet this is more tolerable in the young and those whose blood is still hot and vigorous. But for an old fool to dote—to see an old lecher—what is more hateful, what can be more absurd? And yet what is more common? Who is so frenzied?

If they begin to fall in love at that age, their madness is far more violent,

Some become more infatuated then than they ever did in youth. How many decrepit, grey-haired, rough, wrinkled, ruptured, crooked, toothless, bald, bleary-eyed, impotent, decayed old men will you see still flirting everywhere?

One gets himself a young wife, another a courtesan. He can scarcely lift his leg over a threshold and already has one foot in Charon’s boat; his joints tremble, his feet are gouty; he has a perpetual catarrh in his head and a persistent cough. His sight fails; he is hard of hearing; his breath stinks; all his moisture has dried up and vanished, and he cannot even spit. A child again, unable to dress himself or cut his own food, he will still dream of and pine for girls. What could be more unseemly?

It is worse in women than in men, when she is “advanced in years, long widowed, a mother long ago: she seems to pursue marriage with little propriety.” An old widow, a mother so long since—in Pliny’s opinion—seeks marriage very unbecomingly,