The Anatomy of Melancholy

You honeysuckle of the hawthorn hedge, Accept my heart’s toast in Cupid’s cup; My heart’s dear blood, sweet Cis, is your draught, Worth all the ale in old Mistress Gubbins’s house. I say no more: my duties call me away; My father’s horse is waiting for its fodder. Be Lady Cressetlight to me, And I will be Sir Trolly Lolly to you. Written in haste: farewell, my sweet cowslip; Let us meet at the alehouse on Sunday.

Your sternest Stoics and most austere philosophers melt under this passion. If Athenaeus does not misrepresent them, Aristippus, Apollidorus, Antiphanes and others wrote love songs and accounts praising their mistresses. Orators write letters; princes give titles, honours—what will they not give? Xerxes gave Themistocles Lampsacus to supply his wine, Magnesia his bread, and Myus the rest of his food.

The Persian kings allotted entire cities to similar purposes: “Let this city supply the woman’s headband, this one her neck ornaments, this one her hair ornaments.” One whole city served to adorn her hair, another her neck, a third her headdress. Ahasuerus would have given Esther half his empire, and Herod told Herodias to ask whatever she wished: she should have it.

Caligula gave his courtesan 100,000 sesterces at the first word, to buy her pins; yet when the Senate asked him to contribute to repairing Rome’s crumbling walls for the public good, he would give no more than 6,000 sesterces.

Dionysius, the Sicilian tyrant, rejected all his privy councillors and was so besotted with his favourite and mistress Mirrha that he would appoint no one to office or act in the kingdom’s most important affairs without her special advice. He would promote, remove, dispatch or receive no man, however worthy and deserving, without her consent; while anyone she recommended, however unfit and unworthy, received the highest approval.

Instead of poems, kings and emperors build cities. Hadrian built Antinoa in Egypt, besides constellations, temples, altars, statues and images in honour of his Antinous. Alexander spent immense sums to perpetuate the glory of his Hephaestion.

Socrates professes himself “Love’s servant,” ignorant of every art and science, a master only in matters of love. “Although he disclaimed knowledge of all other things,” says his follower Maximus of Tyre, “he professed expertise in this business.” He said this openly, at home and abroad, at public feasts, in the Academy, “in the Piraeus, in the Lyceum, beneath the plane tree,” and elsewhere—the very bloodhound of beauty, as others call him.