The Anatomy of Melancholy

Mertila in Aristaenetus swore she would never love Pamphilus again, and kept her passion under control while he was away. But the next time he appeared, she could not restrain herself: “embracing him lavishly, she lets herself be caressed,” and so forth. She broke her vow and embraced him without restraint.

Hermotinus, a young man in the same author, is every bit as unsteady. He had quite forgotten his mistress, and his friends had thoroughly weaned him from loving her; but, seeing her by chance, “he recognized the traces of the old flame” and raved violently. “Yet, coming into view, she began to shine like a bright star,” and so forth: she appeared to his eyes like a blazing star or an angel. And it is the common experience of all lovers to be overcome in this way.

For that reason, presumably, Alexander recognized the trouble and danger that come from looking. When he heard Darius’s wife so highly praised for her beauty, he would scarcely allow her into his sight, perhaps anticipating Plutarch’s saying, “to look at a beautiful woman is most dangerous.” Though intemperate in other things, in this “he bore himself nobly”: he behaved admirably.

Likewise, when Araspas in Xenophon had so greatly praised Panthea’s divine face to Cyrus, the more her beauty surpassed the ordinary, the less willing Cyrus was to see her.

Scipio, a young man of twenty-three and the most handsome of the Romans, equal in looks to the Greek Charinus or Homer’s Nireus, was besieging a city in Spain when a noble and very beautiful young gentlewoman was brought to him. Hearing that she was betrothed to a lord, he gave her gifts and sent her back to her sweetheart.

Saint Augustine, as Gregory reports, “thought he ought not to live even with his own sister”: he would not share a house with her. Xenocrates lay beside Lais of Corinth all night and would not touch her.

Although all Athens supposed Socrates to be infatuated with handsome Alcibiades, when he had an opportunity to sleep in the same room, “one man alone with another,” and was also courted by him, as Alcibiades publicly confessed, “he spurned his beauty and proudly disdained it”: he rejected him with scorn.

Petrarch, who had so exalted his Laura in various poems, would not accept her when she was offered to him through the Pope’s intervention.

“It is a great happiness to be free from this passion of love, and a man who can restrain himself so shows great judgment; but once you are in love, to govern yourself,” as he says, “is a rare achievement of wisdom.”

For avoiding being thrown into love’s snares Is not so difficult as escaping once caught in the nets And breaking through the strong knots of Venus.

Avoiding such nets is no great feat; Escaping once caught is the whole victory.