The Anatomy of Melancholy

After the Greek fashion of those times—“her arms bare for more than half their length,” as Daphne’s were when she fled from Phoebus, a sight that deeply moved him. Ismene was always ready to attend to him and pour his drink. Her eyes never left him: “imploring eyes,” those speaking, courting, enchanting eyes. She kept smiling at him. When they had risen and she found a little opportunity, she came and drank to him, treading on his toes as she did so. She would come and go, and when the company prevented him from speaking, she would squeeze his hand and blush when she met him.

By these means she first overcame him: “As I drank, I drank in love as well.” She would kiss the cup, drink to him, smile and drink from the same side of the cup where he had drunk. Through these mutual embraces, kisses, hand-squeezings, foot-pressings and so on, “I seemed to be sipping the girl herself.” I sipped and sipped and sipped, until suddenly I found myself drunk with love.

In Aristaenetus, Philocharinus happened to meet a beautiful young woman, a complete stranger. He looked back at her; she looked back at him and smiled.

That day was the beginning of death, the first Cause of evils——and so on.

That alone led to their further acquaintance and the love that ruined him.

Oh, it is unsafe to trust any blandishments.

These opportunities of time and place, with their attendant circumstances, are such powerful inducements that it is almost impossible for two young people of the same age to live together without falling in love—especially in great households and princely courts, where they are idle “to the highest degree,” eat well, live at ease and do not know how else to spend their time.

Put Hippolytus there: he will become Priapus.

Achilles’s mother Thetis sent him while still a minor to be brought up on Scyros, the island in the Aegean Sea then ruled by Lycomedes. This was to escape the cruel destiny foretold by the oracle: that he would be killed at the siege of Troy. For that reason he was raised in the women’s quarters among the king’s children, dressed as a woman. But see the outcome! He slept with the king’s beautiful daughter Deidamia and had a fine son by her, called Pyrrhus.

The philosopher Peter Abelard tells his own story. Fulbert, the uncle of the lovely Heloise, appointed him to teach his niece and lodged him in his house for that purpose. Thus “a tender lamb was entrusted to a hungry wolf”—I use his own words. Abelard soon won her affection: “there were more kisses than learned statements,” and he lectured more on love than on any other subject. Opportunity can play such pretty tricks: “first joined in one house, then in their minds,” and so on.