The Anatomy of Melancholy

Yet wrongdoing has been so great in every age that these measures seem to achieve little. “Let there be no beggar in our state,” says Plato. He would have them purged from a commonwealth, like a corrupt humour from the body: they are like so many ulcers and boils, which must be cured before the melancholy body can find relief.

For the measures taken in this matter by Charlemagne, the Chinese, the Spaniards, the Duke of Saxony, and many other states, read Arnisaeus, chapter 19; Botero, Book 8, chapter 2; and Osório, The Deeds of King Manuel, Book 11. When a country has too many people, as a pasture often has too many cattle, it used in former times to relieve itself by sending out colonies or by wars, like the ancient Romans; or by employing people at home on public works, such as bridges and roads, for which those Romans were famous on this island.

as Augustus Caesar did at Rome, and the Spaniards in their mines in the Indies, for example at Potosí in Peru, where some 30,000 men are continually at work and 6,000 furnaces constantly blaze. Aqueducts, bridges, harbours, those astonishing works of Trajan, Claudius’s at Ostia, the Baths of Diocletian, Lake Fucinus, the Piraeus at Athens built by Themistocles, amphitheatres of finely worked marble at Verona, Philippi, and Heraclea in Thrace, and the Appian and Flaminian Ways—all these prodigious works bear witness.

And rather than let them remain idle, rulers should act as those Egyptian pharaohs, Moeris and Sesostris, did: set their subjects to build unnecessary pyramids, obelisks, labyrinths, canals, and lakes, all gigantic works, to turn them away from rebellion, dissipation, and drunkenness—“so that they may be fed and may not, through wandering about, lose the habit of work.”

Another eyesore is the lack of water channels and navigable rivers: political writers such as Botero and Hippolytus a Collibus consider neglect of these a serious defect in a commonwealth. Astonishing sums are spent on them in the Low Countries, the Duchy of Milan, the territory of Padua, in France, Italy, and China; likewise on diverting water to irrigate and refresh barren land, and to drain fens, bogs, and marshes.

By these means Masinissa made many inland parts of Barbary and Numidia in Africa fruitful and productive, where before his time they had been uncultivated and forbidding. Great efforts of this kind are made throughout the eastern countries, especially in Egypt, around Babylon and Damascus, as Varthema and Gotthard Arthus report; around Barcelona, Segovia, Murcia, and many other places in Spain, and Milan in Italy. As a result their soil is greatly enriched, and countless benefits accrue to the inhabitants.