De planctu naturae

"Now from this artifice of my teaching, the theory of the amatory art shines forth; but through the book of experience, you will be able to acquire its practice. Nor should it seem strange if, in the aforesaid depiction of Cupid, I insert some notes of reproof, although he himself is bound to me by a certain tie of blood kinship; for it was not the smoky rust of slanderous malice, nor the fervor of blazing hatred breaking forth, nor the tyrant of envy raging outside, that drove me to these invective accusations, but rather that I might not seem to strangle in silence the evidence of truth that speaks for itself. For I do not fault the original nature of Cupid as dishonorable, if it is hedged in by the reins of modesty, if it is chastened by the bridle of temperance; if its shoot does not overstep its appointed bounds, or its heat does not boil over into excessive swelling. But if its spark has escaped into a flame, or its little spring has swollen into a torrent, the luxuriance of that excess demands the sickle of amputation, and the swelling of that overflow craves the comfort of medicine. For every excess disturbs the pace of tempered moderation, and the swelling of morbid abundance festers, as it were, into certain abscesses of vice.

The foregoing theatrical speech, then, having wandered off into playful frivolities, was served up as a first course to your youthfulness; now let my pen, grown a little more mature, return to the purpose of the narration I had set out to give.

As I taught above in passing, I appointed Venus over the propagation of earthly animals that must be given matter, so that in forging the various materials into things requiring matter, she might lay a foundation; while I myself, in the manifold purification of natures, in order that I might set my hand to the final polishing of the works, and so that the fidelity of the instruments might exclude any ferment of wicked operation, fashioned for her two lawful hammers, by which she might both guard against the snares of the Fates and present the manifold things of essence. I also assigned to her craft the noble workshops of the anvils, instructing her that, by fitting these same hammers to them, she should faithfully devote herself to the fashioning of things, and not allow the hammers to wander from the anvils by any deviation. For the office of writing, too, I had granted her a most capable pen, so that on the fitting tablets demanding the writing of that same pen, of which she had been made mistress by my bounty, she might, according to the little rule of my orthography, shape the kinds of things, lest I should let her stray from the path of proper description into the byway of false writing.

But since the genial coupling itself, in its ordered unions, was bound to join together the dissimilar things of different sexes for the carrying out of the propagation of things, so that in its couplings it might observe the canonical constructions of the art of grammar, and so that the nobility of its own craftsman might suffer no detriment to her glory through ignorance of any art, I taught her, under courtly precepts and masterly discipline, that very discipline which would admit the rules of the art of grammar into the artful unions of its constructions; but would exclude all others, irregular and redeemed by the excuse of no figure of speech. For since, on the testimony of grammar, the reason of nature has recognized two genders specially, masculine and feminine, although certain men deprived of their mark could, in my opinion, be reckoned under the designation of the neuter gender, nevertheless I impressed upon Cypris, under the most intimate warnings and the thunder of threats, that in her conjunctions, by reason of what is required, she should celebrate the natural construction only of the masculine and feminine genders. For since the masculine gender takes to itself the feminine by the requirement of a genial relation, if the construction of these genders should be celebrated anomalously, so that things of the same sex should be construed with one another, that construction indeed could earn no pardon from me, whether by the remedy of evocation or by the support of conception. For if the masculine gender should claim its like by a kind of unreasonable demand, no honesty of figure could excuse that joining of construction as anything but a vice, but it would be disgraced by the monstrosity of an inexcusable solecism.

Moreover, my precept enjoined upon Cypris that she, in her constructions, observing the ordinary rules of subject and apposition, should assign the thing marked by the character of the feminine sex to the office of the subject; but the thing specified by the masculine gender she should set in the place of the apposite, so that neither might the apposite presume to decline into the place of the subject, nor the subject be able to migrate into the region of the apposite; and even when each is governed by the other, the apposite should keep the property proper to the adjective, the subject the property proper to the subjective, as summoned by the laws of requirement. I further added that the Dionean conjunction should not take on the uniform habit of a transitive construction, nor the course of reciprocation, nor the winding path of a retransitive return, but should be content with the straight direction of transition alone, nor should it suffer the excessive interruption of any digressive nature, so that the active gender might pass over into the passive by a usurping assumption, or the same might return into the active by the disposition of its own property, or, while keeping beneath the letter of the passive the nature of the active, might take upon itself the law of a deponent term.

Nor should it seem strange if many of the greatest maxims, inscribed under the title of the grammatical faculty, suffer rejection from the dwelling of the amatory art, since that art admits into the bosom of her intimacy those maxims that obey the rules of her own teaching; but those which strive, with the assaults of a most eloquent contradiction, to storm her laws, she suspends under the exclusion of eternal anathema, although the authority of philosophical assertion confesses that most of the maxims are common to different faculties; while certain others have no license to range beyond the dwellings of their own disciplines.

But because I knew that Venus, a new combatant, was about to enter into conflict against such sharp oppositions of the Fates, lest Venus, through the evasiveness of some fallacy, should fear the constraining subtleties of Atropos's conclusion, I taught her that very discipline by which, according to the precepts of the art of debate, she might get beyond the mere forms of her own arguments. And I taught her how, in the deceitful arguments of an adversary, she might find the hiding place of the fallacy, so that she might more safely wage the agony of debate against the snares of the opposing side, and, by bringing forward an instance, refute similar arguments of opposition. I also enjoined that her syllogistic combination, content with the brevity of two terms, subject to none of the Aristotelian figures, should be woven together in the fitting arrangement of three propositions, to such a degree that, in each proposition, the greater extremity should perform the office of predication, while the lesser should be held by the laws of subjection. In the first proposition, indeed, the predicate should inhere in the subject by no mode of true inherence, but by the sole reason of an intrinsic contract; but in the assumption, by the reciprocal impressions of relative eyes, the greater extremity should be joined more expressly to the lesser. But in the conclusion, of the most express inherence, the connection of subject and predicate should be celebrated by a truer, carnal bond. This too was my counsel, that the terms of the Venereal combination, keeping the rights of analogical predication, should exchange their places by turns, with no pestilential retrogradation of conversion. And lest the fallacy of the consequent, born from the conformation of like things, should hinder the industry of Venus, I marked the terms with special signs, so that, by a free and familiar recognition, she might boldly know which terms the lower degree of subjection, and which the higher summit of predication, might claim by right of their own condition, lest, if an inconsistent combination of terms should not keep a proportioned relation in common, a uniform deformity of nonsense should be born.

But just as I wished to banish, by the incursion of a most hostile inhospitality, certain observances of grammar and dialectic from the schools of Venus, so too I forbade to the craft of Cypris the metonymic propositions of the rhetoricians, which mother Rhetoric, embracing them in the bosom of her own amplitude, forges together into her reasons with many honors, lest, by too harsh an excursion of transference away from its protesting subject, the reward should be alienated into something else: wit into crime, urbanity into rusticity, a figure of speech into a vice, and too much color into a discoloration.

With these instruments and marks of nobility, Venus passed from her heavenly dwelling into her earthly one. There, laboring and sweating with her auxiliary instruments to weave together the succession of the human race, and mending with a subtle needle whatever had been slain by the hands of the Fates, she knots these things together yet more subtly. And so she discharged the duties of her stipendiary office with the most dutiful diligence.

But because a mind grows weary and indignant from the sameness of a mother's satiety, and the appetite for carrying out one's purpose is extinguished by the daily onset of labor, the oneness of a task so often repeated began to plague Cytherea with distaste, and the effect of continued labor shut out the affection for laboring. She, therefore, preferring to be made effeminate by a barren idleness rather than to be exercised in fruitful labors, setting aside her workaday practice in favor of business, began, out of the desires of excessive idleness, to grow young again in a childish way. And since, wherever the torpor of idleness makes camp, from there the whole army of virtue is banished, and the barrenness of idleness is wont to bring about the fruitfulness of a wicked offspring. A flooding deluge of drink, too, foams over into excessive lusts, and the unbridled gorging of food belches up like feelings of surfeit and nausea.

Venus, goaded by these deadly furies, staining with the plague of adultery the chastity of the marriage bed owed to her own husband, began to fornicate in concubinage with Antigamus, and, entangled by the deadly suggestions of her adulterer, wrongfully changes her liberal work into a mechanical one, the regular into the anomalous, the civil into the rustic; and, having broken faith with my precept, disinheriting the hammers from the fellowship of the anvils, she condemns them to adulterous anvils instead. The native anvils themselves, lamenting the absence of their own hammers, seem tearfully to cry out for them. And she who used to raise the shield of defense against the sword of all-mowing Atropos is now bound to that very sword by the stability of a mutual pact of reconciliation, allowing the sickle of fate to range too freely over the harvest of the human race, and paying for the loss with no new origin of seed; but rather, destroying herself in her grammatical constructions, inverting herself in dialectical conversions, discoloring herself with rhetorical colors, she turns her art into a figure of speech, and that figure of speech into a vice: and while she perpetuates the enticements of concubinage with her adulterer through fornicating excesses, she receives from him, in place of a son, and is made mistress of a bastard instead. And since he rejoices in the charm of no delight, and wishes to bask in the pleasures of no playful joy, so that, as though by antiphrasis, jest is named from jestlessness, common usage stamped upon him his name.

Two sons, then, were given to Dione, differing in their disparate kind, unlike in the law of their birth, soon at odds in their titles, deformed in their craft. For Hymenaeus, in the bond of a shared-womb brotherhood bordering on kinship, whom a lineage of more excellent dignity exalts, begets for himself Cupid from Venus as a son; but Antigamus, sprung from a low and scurrilous stock, by his adultery playfully fathers for himself an adulterine son, Jest. The solemnity of marriage excuses the birth of the one; the vulgarity of a notorious concubinage accuses the begetting of the other. In the one, the urbanity of a father's civility shines forth; in the other, the rusticity of a father's incivility grows dark. The one dwells in silvery fountains bright with silver gleams; the other unweariedly frequents places condemned to everlasting dryness. The one has pitched his tents on a pleasant plain; the wooded places of the valleys please the other. The one spends the night unfailingly beneath a tent; the other continues his days and nights beneath the open sky. The one wounds with golden hunting-spears the one he hunts; the other pierces with iron javelins the one he strikes. The one makes drunk his guests with a slightly bitter nectar; the other destroys his with a draught of sour wormwood.

Now my speech has inscribed upon the little page of your mind how the ruinous blight of idleness nurtured an overwrought Venus, how the flooding of a deluge of drink works a poisonous conflagration, and how, taking its origin from the gorging of food, an elephantine leprosy of lust has struck down so many. Behold, over men languishing from the sharp fever of Venus, I have sung a plaintive song of sorrowful lament; now let us likewise tune the lyre of a complaining speech, in elegiac song, for others whom the sickly throng of other vices troubles. For many, while fleeing the yawning, devouring gulfs of gluttonous Charybdis, are shipwrecked by unexpected peril in the abyss of a malignant Scylla. Many more, while escaping the swollen onset of an impetuous torrent, are caught fast in the mire of a stagnant pool. Others, while, with cautious counsel, they avoid the precipices of an overhanging mountain, are dashed down by a sudden fall on level, even ground.

Fix these things, then, which I shall set forth, into your mind with the nail of a tenacious memory, and shake off the sleep of torpor with a watchful spirit, so that, roused with me by a mother's inmost feeling, you may grieve in sympathy with the shipwrecks of endangered men, and, armored with the shield of this preliminary warning, may confront the monstrous army of vices, and, if any wicked seeds should dare to sprout in the garden of your mind, may root them out with the sickle of a timely cutting."

Then I said: "Already my mind, cheered by the compendium of your teaching, inclines a most willing ear to your corrections."

Then she: