from The Anatomy of Melancholy
Democritus Junior (Robert Burton)
A third argument may be derived from the precedent, [436]all men are
carried away with passion, discontent, lust, pleasures, &c., they generally
hate those virtues they should love, and love such vices they should hate.
Therefore more than melancholy, quite mad, brute beasts, and void of
reason, so Chrysostom contends; "or rather dead and buried alive," as [437] Philo Judeus concludes it for a certainty, "of all such that are carried
away with passions, or labour of any disease of the mind. Where is fear and
sorrow," there [438]Lactantius stiffly maintains, "wisdom cannot dwell,"------"qui cupiet, metuet quoque porro,
Qui metuens vivit, liber mihi non erit unquam."[439]Seneca and the rest of the stoics are of opinion, that where is any the
least perturbation, wisdom may not be found. "What more ridiculous," as
[440]Lactantius urges, than to hear how Xerxes whipped the Hellespont,
threatened the Mountain Athos, and the like. To speak _ad rem_, who is free
from passion? [441]_Mortalis nemo est quem non attingat dolor, morbusve_, as [442]Tully determines out of an old poem, no mortal men can avoid sorrow
and sickness, and sorrow is an inseparable companion from melancholy.
[443]Chrysostom pleads farther yet, that they are more than mad.
I proofread a few pages of this book while it was at Distributed Proofreaders. It was extremely hard going, especially transliterating the Greek. It's nice to see someone making use of the PG version.
Dear bandiera,
I did a few pages this myself at D.P. It was by far the most difficult task I had to do there given the quality of the text from which we were working and the incredible abundance of footnotes. But I am extremely grateful that it has been made available in this format. Thank you and all who contributed.
shalom,
Steven
I guess that's the point, isn't it...you wouldn't care to tackle too many pages of this text (they took 1-2 hours apiece for the first pass, IIRC), but if you can stomach a couple and I can and everyone does one or two, hey, eventually an "untouchable" text winds up very much in the public domain. Well done - glad to come across another DPer!