The Anatomy of Melancholy

Paolo Giovio censures the philosopher Agostino Nifo because, “though an old man, a public professor and the father of many children, he was so madly in love with a young girl”—a sight that shamed many of his friends—“that, old and gouty as he was, he would still dance to fiddlers.” Many laughed him to scorn, but all-powerful love insisted on it.

With a hyacinth wand, Hurrying Love drove me Forcibly to follow.

Hasty Love, with his purple staff, compelled Me to follow and take up the dance.

There is nothing new in this, nothing improper; a good reason can be given for it. Cupid and Death met at an inn and, being in a merry mood, exchanged some arrows from their quivers. Ever since, young men die and old men often fall foolishly in love.

Thus the young man dies; thus the dying man loves.

Who, then, can resist it? Once we are in love, young or old, though our teeth rattle in our heads like the jacks of a virginal, or stand far apart like the arches of a bridge, there is no help for it: if need be, we must dance Trenchmore over tables, chairs, stools and so on. And princum prancum is a fine dance.

Plutarch, in Table Talk, book 1, question 5, offers some excuse for it, and explains the sense in which “love teaches music, even to someone previously unskilled”: how love makes people with no previous ability learn to sing and dance. He concludes that it is simply the power and authority love has over us. “Love,” he maintains, “will make a silent man speak, a shy man most obliging, the dull quick, the slow nimble; and, most remarkable of all, it will make a hard, mean, unmanageable churl—as fire softens iron in a smith’s forge—open-handed, accommodating, gentle and easy to persuade.”

Indeed, it will drive him to the opposite extreme of extravagance, paying a hundred sesterces for a night’s lodging, as men once did to Lais of Corinth, or “two hundred thousand drachmas for a single night,” as Mundus offered Paulina; spending his entire fortune, as too many do in such cases, to gain his desire. This is why many compare love to wine, which makes men jovial and merry, playful and sad, whine, sing, dance—and what does it not make them do?

But above all the other symptoms of lovers, this must not lightly be passed over: whatever their condition, once they fall in love they usually become, as their ability permits, rhymesters, ballad-makers and poets. For, as Plutarch says, “They will bear witness to their beloveds’ good qualities and proclaim them abroad, adorning them with verses and songs of praise, as we adorn statues with gold, so that everyone may remember and admire them.”

Old men will sometimes dote in this way as much as anyone else. Love’s heat will thaw their frozen feelings, melt the ice of age, and so invigorate them that, though they are sixty above the waist, they are scarcely thirty below it. Giovanni Pontano makes an old fool rhyme and turn into a would-be poet to please his mistress: