The Anatomy of Melancholy

Physicians make their predictions entirely from bodily temperament and constitution. According to Ficino’s Commentary, chapter 9, phlegmatic people are seldom affected, and those naturally melancholic still less; but once caught, they are never freed. Many, however, believe that people with flatulent or hypochondriacal melancholy are more subject than anyone else to this affliction.

Valescus gives their powerful imagination as the cause; Bodin, an abundance of wind; Gordon, an abundance of semen and spirits, or atoms in the semen, which produce their violent and furious passions. People of a sanguine temperament, then, are soon caught; the young are most inclined to love and, if they had their way, says Lucian, “would have a bout with everyone they see.” The colt’s complaint is common to every constitution.

Theomestus, a vigorous young gallant in the same author, admits that all this is true of him: “I am so amorously disposed that you could sooner count the sands of the sea and the snow falling from the sky than my different loves. Cupid has shot all his arrows at me. I am beguiled by different desires: one love follows another so quickly that, before one is over, I begin a second. The latest is always the fairest, and the woman before me pleases me most.

“My loves multiply like the heads of the Hydra; no Iolaus can help me. My eyes are so moist a refuge and sanctuary of love that they draw every beauty to them and are never satisfied. I wonder what wrath of Venus this can be. Alas, how have I offended her, that she torments me so? What Hippolytus am I? What Telchin is my guardian spirit? Or is this a natural defect, an inherited passion?”

Another speaker in Anacreon confesses that he had twenty sweethearts in Athens at once, fifteen at Corinth, as many at Thebes, Lesbos and Rhodes, twice as many in Ionia, three times as many in Caria—twenty thousand in all. Or, in a word, “If all the leaves,” and so forth:

If you know how to number All the leaves of all the trees, Or count all the sands Within the sea, You alone will I appoint Accountant of my loves.

Can you count the leaves in May, Or the sands in the ocean? Then count my loves, I pray.

His eyes are like a balance, ready to tip either way and to be weighed down by every girl’s looks; his heart is a weathercock; his affection is tinder, or naphtha itself, which every beautiful sight, sweet smile or favour from a mistress sets alight.

Guaineri, treatise 15, chapter 14, attributes all this “to the hot temperament of the testicles”; Ferrand, a Frenchman, in his Erotic Melancholy—a book that first came into my hands after the third edition—to certain atoms in the semen, in people “who produce much semen and are full of it.” I find the same in Aristotle, section 4, problem 17: “If semen is not discharged, erections cannot cease,” as his commentator Guastavini translates it. This is why these sturdy, vigorous young men are so subject to it.

Ercole Sassonia says substantially the same. But generally, I say, those most inclined to love are the young and vigorous, living at ease, stall-fed and free from care, like cattle in a lush pasture; idle and solitary people must inevitably “go into heat like goats,” as Guastavini quotes from Censorinus.