The Anatomy of Melancholy

Or some beautiful object moves them so powerfully that they cannot restrain themselves: whether they hear of it or see it, they will pursue it. Nessus the centaur had agreed to carry Hercules and his wife across the river Evenus. No sooner had he set Deianira on the other side than he tried to rape her, leaving Hercules to swim across as best he could. Although her husband was watching, he would not stop until Hercules shot him dead with a poisoned arrow.

Neptune happened to see Tyro of Thessaly, Eunippius’s wife, and immediately, in the frenzy of his lust, assumed her husband’s appearance and made him a cuckold. Tarquin heard Collatinus praise his wife, and was so inflamed that he went to her in the middle of the night. Theseus abducted Ariadne, “carried off by force” that Anaxa of Troezen, Antiope, and, when he was already old, Helen, a girl not yet ready for marriage.

Great men are, for the most part, all disposed this way: like horses they neigh, says Jeremiah, after their neighbours’ wives,

As a colt neighs at the sight of a mare.

And if they are in company with other women, even in their own wives’ presence, they must court and flirt with them. In Lucian, Juno complains that Jupiter kept kissing Ganymede before her very face, which offended her greatly. Besides, he impersonated Amphitryon, became a bull, a swan and a golden shower, and played many such wicked tricks, too lengthy and too shameful to relate.

Or they care little for their own ladies and fear no laws, daring openly to keep prostitutes under their wives’ noses. Unchastity is all too common among noblemen. “Piety, integrity and fidelity are private virtues,” as someone said long ago: piety, chastity and similar virtues are for private men, and are scarcely to be sought in great courts.

And what Suetonius said of the good princes of his time—that they could all be engraved on a single ring—we may truly say of the chaste rulers of our age. For great personages commonly go astray in this way and give cause for offence.

Montaigne, in his Essays, gives examples in Caesar, Mehmed the Turk, who sacked Constantinople, and Ladislaus, king of Naples, who besieged Florence. Great men and great soldiers are commonly great—and so forth. “It is proved”: they are good performers. Mars and Venus are evenly matched in their activities,

Doves have made their nest in a soldier’s helmet; It is clear how friendly Venus is with Mars.

A dove made her nest inside a helmet: See the bond between Mars and Venus.

Especially if they are bald, for bald men have always been suspect—read more in Aristotle, section 4, problem 19—such as Galba, Otho, Domitian and, conspicuous among them, Caesar. “Citizens, guard your wives: we are bringing home the bald adulterer.”

Besides, this bald Caesar, says Curio in Suetonius, was “every woman’s husband.” He made love to Eunoë, queen of Mauretania; Cleopatra; Postumia, wife of Sergius Sulpitius; Lollia, wife of Gabinius; Tertulla, wife of Crassus; Mucia, Pompey’s wife; and I do not know how many others. And well he might, for if everything I have read is true, he had a licence to sleep with whomever he pleased.