The Anatomy of Melancholy

——who happened in those days to have come to Troy, Inflamed with a mad love for Cassandra.

King John of France, once a prisoner in England, crossed the sea to visit his old friends again; but the truth is that he came to see the Countess of Salisbury, the peerless beauty of those times and his dear mistress.

That god of the underworld, Plutus, came from hell itself to abduct Proserpina. Achilles abandoned all his friends for the sake of Polyxena, his enemy’s daughter; and all the Greek gods left their heavenly dwellings for that beautiful lady Philo, Dioneus’s daughter, the paragon of Greece in those days: “For she was so lovely that all the gods competed to have her as their wife.”

A beautiful girl commands the gods.

They will come not merely to look, but—as a falconer makes a hungry hawk hover nearby—to follow, attend and serve, spending their possessions, their lives and their whole fortunes to gain their desire:

Even if beauty were secured behind twenty locks, Love breaks through, and picks them all at last.

When beautiful Hero appeared in public, the eyes, hearts and affections of those who saw her always followed her.

Among all those faces she towers above the rest, And as she comes through the city they gaze at her as at a goddess.

So far above the rest fair Hero shone, And stole the spellbound onlooker’s mind.

When Pietro Aretino’s Lucretia first came to Rome, and the fame of her beauty spread abroad—“it had reached the devotees of the city’s pleasures; everyone came to see her,” and so on—they came, as the saying goes, thick and fast to see her, and hovered around her gates, as people once did around those of Lais of Corinth and Phryne of Thebes.

At whose doors all Greece lay prostrate.

Every man sought to win her love: some with splendid and costly clothes, some with an affected walk, some with music, others with rich gifts, pleasant conversation or crowds of followers; others with letters, vows and promises, to recommend themselves and find favour in her eyes. Happy was the man who could see her; three times happy the one who enjoyed her company.

Charmides in Plato was a handsome young man, far surpassing others in bodily beauty and every good quality. Whenever handsome Charmides appeared in public, everyone seemed to be in love with him—as Critias describes their behaviour—and they were overcome at the very sight of him. Many drew near him; many followed him wherever he went.

So those “spectators of beauty” followed Acontius whenever he walked abroad. The Athenian girls stared at Alcibiades; Sappho and the women of Mytilene at handsome Phaon. Such lovely sights do not merely please and entice: they carry people away and leave them astonished.

Cleonymus, a delicate, tender youth, attended a feast given by his uncle Androcles in the Piraeus at Athens, when he sacrificed to Mercury. The youth so stupefied the guests—Dineas, Aristippus, Agasthenes and the rest, as Charidemus relates in Lucian—that they could not eat their food. Throughout supper they sat gazing and glancing at him, stealing looks and admiring his beauty.