The Anatomy of Melancholy

Among many others, Aeneas Sylvius sets down three particular ways to recognise a fool. He is a fool who seeks what he cannot find; he is a fool who seeks something that, once found, will do him more harm than good; and he is a fool who, having several routes to his journey’s end, chooses the worst. If so, it seems to me that most people are fools. Examine their conduct and you will soon see what simpletons and madmen the greater part of them are.

Beroaldus considers drunkards, afternoon drinkers, and those who take more than ordinary pleasure in drink to be mad. The first cup quenches thirst, as the poet Panyasis declares in Athenaeus; “the second belongs to the Graces, the Hours, and Dionysus.” The second makes people merry, the third is for pleasure, “the fourth for madness”: the fourth drives them mad. If this proposition is true, what a catalogue of madmen we shall have! What must we call those who drink four times four? Do they not make themselves utterly mad, beyond every frenzy, beyond all madness? I agree with him: they are more than mad, much worse than mad.

The people of Abdera judged Democritus mad because he was sometimes sad and at other times extravagantly merry. “In this country,” says Hippocrates, “they say that he raves and is mad because he laughs”: his countrymen think him mad because he laughs. He therefore asks his correspondent to warn all his friends at Rhodes neither to laugh too much nor to be excessively sad. Had those Abderites lived among us and merely seen the sneering and grinning of our age, they would certainly have concluded that we were all out of our minds.

Aristotle holds in his Ethics that the happy man is also the wise man: to be wise and to be happy are interchangeable terms; the good man is likewise wise and honourable. Cicero’s paradox is that wise men are free, but fools are slaves. Freedom is the power to live by our own laws, as we ourselves wish. Who has this freedom? Who is free?

The wise man who commands himself, Whom neither poverty nor death nor chains can frighten, Strong enough to resist desires and scorn honours, Complete in himself, smooth and round. He is wise who can command his own will, Brave and always steadfast in himself, Whom neither poverty, death, nor chains can frighten, Who checks his desires, scorns honours, and is just and upright.

But where is such a man to be found? If nowhere, then, at the opposite extreme, we are all slaves, senseless or worse. “No wicked man is happy.” But no one is happy in this life, no one good; therefore no one is wise. For good people are rare. For one virtue you will find ten vices in the same person: few Prometheuses, many Epimetheuses.

We may perhaps claim the title for ourselves or bestow it upon others as a favour—Charles the Wise, Philip the Good, Louis the Pious, and so on. We may describe the qualities of a wise man, as Cicero describes an orator, Xenophon Cyrus, Castiglione a courtier, or Galen a balanced bodily constitution, and as political writers describe an aristocracy. But where is such a man to be found?