The Anatomy of Melancholy

This love is the salt that seasons our harsh and tedious labours and gives a pleasant flavour to our otherwise tasteless activities. “Let love depart, and darkness rises, numbness, torpor, pestilence,” and so on. From it arise almost all our feasts, masques, mummings, banquets, merry gatherings, weddings, pleasing songs, fine tunes, poems, love stories, plays, comedies, Atellan farces, jigs, Fescennine verses, elegies, odes, and so forth.

Danaus, son of Belus, instituted the first games ever heard of, some say, at his daughters’ wedding at Argos. Symbols, emblems, imprese and devices may also be attributed to love, if we believe Giovio, Contile, Paradin and Camillo de Camilli.

Most of our arts and sciences, painting among them, were first invented, says Patrizi, “thanks to love”—for love’s sake. For when the daughter of Deburiades of Sicyon was about to part from her sweetheart, who was going to war, “so that she might waste away less from longing for him,” and to comfort herself in his absence, she drew his picture in charcoal on a wall, following the shadow cast by a candle. Her father admired it and afterwards perfected it; and this is said to have been the first picture ever made. Long afterwards, Sicyon ranked above every city in Greece for painting, carving, sculpture, music and philosophy.

Apollo first invented medicine, divination and oracles; Minerva discovered weaving, Vulcan intricate ironwork, Mercury letters. But who put all this into their heads? Love: “They would never have invented such things unless they had loved them.” They loved these things, or some person for whose sake they first undertook them.

True, Vulcan made a most admirable brooch or necklace, which long afterwards Axion and Temenus, the sons of Phegius, dedicated to Apollo at Delphi because of its exceptional worth. But the tyrant Pharyllus stole it and gave it to Ariston’s wife, with whom he was wretchedly infatuated. Parthenius tells the story from Phylarchus. But why did Vulcan make this splendid jewel? To give it to Hermione, Cadmus’s wife, whom he dearly loved.

All our jousts and tournaments, the Orders of the Garter and the Golden Fleece, and so forth—

Nobility lies subject to love—

owe their beginnings to love, as do many of our histories. By these means, says Giovio, they wished to express their loving thoughts to their mistress and to those who watched.

Love is almost the sole subject of poetry. All our invention tends towards it, all our songs, whatever those old Anacreons wrote. Hence Hesiod makes the Muses and Graces continually follow Cupid, and, as Plutarch maintains, Menander and the other poets were Love’s priests. All our Greek and Latin epigrammatists and writers on love—Antonius Diogenes, the earliest, whose epitome we find in Photius’s Bibliotheca; Longus the Sophist, Eustathius, Achilles Tatius, Aristaenetus, Heliodorus, Plato, Plutarch, Lucian, Parthenius, Theodorus, Prodromus, Ovid, Catullus, Tibullus and the rest—