The Anatomy of Melancholy

Prevention before or after marriage: Plato’s community of wives; marrying a courtesan; love potions; brothels; marrying someone equal in age and fortune, from a good family, well educated and of good standing; treating wives well; and so on.

I have said enough about medicines that help cure this malady. Some good remedies remain in the form of prevention, precautions or warnings, which, properly put into practice, may do much good. Plato, in his commonwealth, apparently to prevent this evil, would have everything held in common, wives and children shared alike.

And Caesar observed in his Commentaries that the ancient Britons who first inhabited this land had ten or twelve wives allotted to a household, or shared indiscriminately by as many men: not one wife to one man, as among us, or four, five or six to one, as in Turkey.

The Nicolaitans, a sect that arose, says Augustine, from Nicholas the deacon, would have women shared without distinction. The cause of this filthy sect was Nicholas the deacon’s jealousy: when he was condemned for it, he sought to clear himself of the offence by advancing his heresy that it was lawful to sleep with one another’s wives, and for any man to sleep with his.

Like those Anabaptists at Münster, who would consort with other men’s wives as the spirit moved them; or Muhammad, the prophet who led people astray, who insisted on having women as he pleased, to beget prophets. Their Alcoran says that 205 women were in love with him, and that he had the sexual capacity of forty men.

Among the ancient Carthaginians, as Boemus relates from Sabellicus, the country’s king slept with the bride on the first night, and once a year they all had intercourse indiscriminately. Münster, in his Cosmography, book 3, chapter 497, unjustly attributes the beginning of this brutish custom to a certain Frenchman, Picardus, who invented a new sect of Adamites: they went naked, as Adam did, and engaged in indiscriminate sexual intercourse at appointed times.

When the priest repeated the words from Genesis, “Increase and multiply,” “out went the candles in their meeting place, and without any regard for age, person or social condition, it was catch as catch can: every man took whichever woman came nearest,” and so on. Some attach this charge to the ancient Bohemians and Russians; others to the inhabitants of Mambrium in the Lucerne valley in Piedmont. And, as I have read, it was practised in Scotland among Christians themselves until King Malcolm’s time: the king or lord of the town took their virginity.

In some parts of India in our own time, and among those islanders, as among the ancient Babylonians, they prostitute their wives and daughters to travellers or seafarers who happen to arrive among them—a practice that Chalcocondylas, a modern Greek writer, for lack of better information, attributes to us Britons—to show how far they were from this savage vice of jealousy, and how little account they took of it.