The Anatomy of Melancholy

Nothing beneath heaven so strongly allures Man’s senses and possesses his whole mind As beauty’s loveliest bait, which induces Great warriors to put aside their former harshness, And mighty hands to forget their manly strength, Driven by the power of an eye that sets hearts burning, And wrapped in flowers of a golden lock of hair, Which can, with melting pleasure, soften Their hardened hearts, accustomed to cruelty.

Clitophon frankly confesses that no sooner did he come into Leucippe’s presence than “his heart trembled, and his eyes looked at her lustfully.” He was wounded at first sight; his heart pounded, and he could not possibly turn his eyes away from her.

So too Calasiris in Heliodorus, book 2, a venerable old priest of Isis, complains that when he happened to see the Thracian Rhodopis at Memphis, he could not keep his eyes off her. “I will not hide it: her presence overcame me and fiercely attacked the chastity I had maintained into old age. For a long time I resisted my bodily eyes with the eyes of my understanding; at last I was conquered and swept headlong as in a storm.”

Xenophiles, a philosopher, had bitterly railed against women for many years, scorning, hating and mocking them. At last he found himself in the company of Daphnis, a beautiful girl; and, as he laments his misfortune to his friend Demaritus, although he had been free before,

Untouched before by any desires,

he suddenly fell deeply in love and was completely overcome. “I confess I am conquered by Daphnis,” and so on: I admit I am captured.

She alone has swayed my feelings and pushed My wavering spirit onward——

I could hold out no longer.

A similar misfortune, but worse, befell Stratocles the physician, that bleary-eyed old man, “full of mucus,” as Prodromus describes him. All his life he had been a fierce woman-hater, “always uttering foul and insulting things against women,” a bitter persecutor of the whole sex: “he called them human asps and vipers.” He constantly renounced them all and mocked them wherever he went in such vile terms “that you would have hated your mother and sisters”: if you had heard him, you would have loathed your own mother and sisters because of what he said.

Yet this old doting fool was finally captivated by the heavenly, divine look of Myrilla, the gardener Anticles’s daughter, that smiling girl. He shaved off his bushy beard, painted his face, curled his hair, wore a laurel crown to cover his bald head, and was almost driven mad by love for her.

For on the very day he married, he was so frenzied “that he could scarcely wait for sunset”—a terrible, monstrously long day. He could not wait until night, “but hurried into the bridal chamber without saying goodbye to anyone.” With the food scarcely out of his mouth and without taking leave, he insisted on going straight to bed. What young man, then, can consider himself safe, if old men are so uncontrolled? Who can say, “I shall not be captivated by a beautiful sight. I can, I will restrain myself”?

“No,” says Lucian of his mistress: “she is so beautiful that if you merely see her, she will stupefy you, kill you on the spot, and turn you to stone like Medusa. You cannot pull your eyes away from her; like a magnet drawing iron,” she will drag you captive wherever she chooses, poisoning you like a basilisk. This holds for men and women alike. Dido was amazed by Aeneas’s presence: “Sidonian Dido was astonished at the first sight.” And, as another man feelingly confirmed from experience: