The Anatomy of Melancholy

She came to Apollo’s temple to learn what she should do to ease her pain. Apollo sent her to Leucata Petra, where she threw herself down and was immediately freed. When she insisted on knowing the reason, he answered that he had often seen Jupiter go there to find relief and bathe when he was enamoured of Juno, and various others after him.

Cephalus leapt down here for love of Protela, daughter of Degoneus; and Sappho of Lesbos for Phaon, on whom she doted miserably.

Driven by Cupid’s frenzy, she plunged headlong from the summit.

Hoping in this way to find relief and be freed from the pangs of love.

Here Deucalion, burning with love for Pyrrha, Plunged into the water and struck it unharmed. Without delay, his love fled, etc.

Here Deucalion came when love for Pyrrha Tormented him, and leapt down into the sea. He suffered no harm at all, and straight away His love was gone, completely driven off.

Joseph Scaliger speaks of this remedy in his Readings in Ausonius, book 18; so do Salmuth in his commentary on Panciroli, On the Seven Wonders of the World, and other writers. Pliny reports that among the Cyzeni there is a spring consecrated to Cupid, and that any lover who tastes its water has his passion eased.

And Anthony Verdurius, Images of the Gods, on Cupid, says that the ancients had a Love of Forgetfulness: he took burning torches and extinguished them in the river. His statue could be seen in the temple of Venus Elusina, which Ovid mentions, saying that in antiquity all lovers who wished to be rid of their pangs went there on pilgrimage.

Pausanias, in his account of Phocis, writes of a temple dedicated “to Venus in a cave”—to Venus in the vault—at Naupactus in Achaea, now Lepanto. There, widows who wanted second husbands made their petitions to the goddess; all manner of lovers’ suits were brought and their grievances relieved.

The same author, in his account of Achaea, tells a similar story of the river Seneleus in Greece: if any lover bathed in it, a hidden power in the water—because of its extreme coldness, perhaps—healed him of love’s torments.

The one who heals love’s wound is the very one who makes it.

If that is so, the water, as he maintains, is “more precious than all gold,” worth more than any gold. Where none of these remedies has any effect, I know no other course: all lovers must join forces and rebel, as they did in Ausonius, and crucify Cupid until he grants their request or satisfies their desires.