The Anatomy of Melancholy

Many patient Griseldas, through compliance of this kind, have reclaimed their husbands from their wandering lusts. In New France and Turkey, as Leah, Rachel and Sarah did for Abraham and Jacob, they bring their prettiest young women to their husbands’ beds. Livia assisted Augustus’s lustful appetites; Stratonice, wife of King Diotarus, not only brought a beautiful young woman, Electra, to her husband’s bed, but raised the children he fathered on her as carefully as if they had been her own.

The wife of Tertius Aemilius, Cornelia’s mother, perceived her husband’s lack of restraint but “pretended not to notice,” treated the maid kindly, and took no notice of the affair. A newly married man had a tale-bearing friend who, to win his favour, showed him his wife privately intimate with a young gallant, courting and fondling her, and so on. “Nonsense,” he said, “let him do his worst: I dare trust my wife, though I dare not trust him.”

The best remedy, then, is kind treatment; if that will not work, pretend not to notice, as I say, or dismiss it with a joke. Hear Guevara’s advice in this case: “Either receive it with a joke, or evade it with silence.” For if you take offence at everything your wife does, Solomon’s wisdom, Hercules’s courage, Homer’s learning, Socrates’s patience and Argus’s watchfulness will not suffice. Therefore Nevizzano thinks it “the lesser evil”—a smaller mischief—to pretend not to notice, to be “a buyer of cradles,” as the proverb says, rather than to be too anxious.

“A good fellow, when his wife gave birth before her time, bought half a dozen cradles in advance for as many children, as if she were going to keep having children every two months.” When someone told the emperor Pertinax that a fiddler was too familiar with his empress, he took no notice. And when Philip of Macedon was reproached for his wife’s unchastity—“although he was the conqueror of so many kingdoms and peoples,” and so on, a conqueror of kingdoms could not tame his wife, for she put him out of doors—he made a joke of it. “Wise men bear their horns in their breasts; fools on their foreheads,” says Nevizzano: wise men bear their horns in their hearts, fools on their foreheads.

Eumenes, king of Pergamum, was in a deadly feud with Perseus of Macedonia. When Perseus heard of a journey Eumenes was going to make to Delphi, he stationed a company of soldiers to intercept him on the way. They did so and, as they supposed, left him stoned to death. News of this deed was immediately brought to Pergamum. Attalus, Eumenes’s brother, at once proclaimed himself king, took possession of the crown, and married Queen Stratonice.

But soon, when news came to the contrary—that King Eumenes was alive and approaching the city—he put aside his crown, left his wife, and went as a private citizen to meet him and welcome his return. Though Eumenes knew everything that had happened, he concealed his knowledge, affectionately embraced his brother, and restored his wife to favour, as though no such thing had been heard of or done.