and 
: the unity of the spirit and the cosmic mixture of elements defining the physical condition. Melancholia is the dissolution and indisposition of these two — can there be a more expansive, more daring medical approach to things? The origin is physical2—Hippocrates relates that when he visited Democritus, who was not only melancholic himself but wrote a treatise about the malady, he found the philosopher sitting under a tree and dissecting animals to find the cause of the melancholic mood — whereas the outcome is eminently intellectual. And vice versa: the origin, being physical, is cosmic and superhuman (a product of the interplay of wind, landscape, season, climate, even the planets and stars), but its effect manifests in a person’s matchless and unique psychic and intellectual qualities, making him or her radically different from everyone else. Thus, in Hippocrates’ view, the illness of melancholia is the result of some kind of anomaly: the balance of the micro- and macrocosm has tipped, order (the cosmos) has broken down, disorder has set in, and the affected person no longer obeys the indissoluble laws of the universe and his or her own fate. 
—they have stepped out of themselves, fallen into ecstasy, Hippocrates says of melancholics at one point, and his eloquent use of the medial, reflexive form of the verb points to penetrating observation: the subjects are not only thrown upon the mercy of a will that is alien to them but they are also the objects of their own actions. Melancholics stand outside the customary rules of life; but fate, which wanted it to be so, is their own fate as welclass="underline" their life, the relationship they have evolved with fate, determines their state (malady) just as much as does the cosmos, over which they have no control. This, however, Hippocrates does not say — voicing such ideas in the world of self-explanatory phenomena would have struck people as verging on the suspicious.
We have now got somewhat nearer the quotation from Aristotle that stands at the head of this chain of ideas. Melancholics are outstanding, the philosopher asserts, and that relates to the Hippocratic notion that the melancholic is suffering from a disturbance of balance that extends to, and points beyond, everything. Hippocrates considered melancholia to be an illness.3 Aristotle, on the other hand, regarded it as an exalted state in which the “patient” was also capable of conjuring up healthy and durable works likely to captivate everyone. True to the Hippocratic tradition, Aristotle took the observation of the body as a starting point: he, too, held that an excess of black bile compared with the other humors was unhealthy, but he considered the temperature of black bile as being the ultimate causal factor. A person in whom the black bile warmed up excessively would be happy and good-natured without reason (whence the kinship of melancholia and mania in antiquity), whereas those in whom it cooled down unduly became sorrowful and depressed. It was characteristic of melancholics as a class that the temperature of the black bile would decrease to a moderate level (
). Since it was a medium type, it was therefore healthy, and since the hot and cold were mixing appropriately, melancholics were capable of all kinds of things and were able to achieve great things in politics, the arts, philosophy, and poetry, though they were also at constant risk of the dangers associated with the cooling down or heating up of the black bile. A person of melancholic temperament was therefore characterized by a peculiar state in which, on the one hand, the black bile was in excess, an unhealthy symptom compared with a median distribution of the humors, but on the other hand, even in that condition of excess, the medium, that is health, was still attainable. A characteristic feature of humors is poor mixing, 
, while that of temperature is good mixing, 
; in other words, the melancholic type was characterized by a peculiar coexistence of the medium and the extreme. The two do not rule each other out. In The Nicomachean Ethics, for instance, one can read (in another context): “a person of ambition, in regard to magnanimity, stands at the highest grade; but if one takes that he always does as one should, then one has to say that he stands at the middle” (1123b). Writing about the celestial firmament being spherical, Aristotle mentions “the center and the extremity” being one (On the Heavens, 8 = Peri Uranu biblia, 923b). Could not a melancholic be characterized as combining the center and the extremity in a single individual, one wonders? Not that this would mean peace and harmony; constant oscillation between the two ensures the balance that makes the creation of great works and the execution of great feats possible. But the same oscillation also makes inevitable the continuous transgression of borders without which great works and feats would be equally inconceivable. Thus, the melancholic perceives the order of the cosmos by constantly violating it. No melancholic, therefore, can on any account be an average individual — but rising above the average does not mean the person is sick; if anything, the person is capable of a healthier life than the average. That “outstanding health” (sickness, viewed from the viewpoint of sobriety), however, has other criteria than those of “average health.”
Melancholics are extraordinary individuals; but how does their extraordinariness manifest? Aristotle gives no answer to that, though he does name a few persons whom he considers melancholic. The persons he lists are Ajax, Bellerophon, Heracles, Empedocles, Plato, Socrates, and Lysander. The first three are mythological heroes, the next three philosophers, and the last named was a politician. The common factor, at first sight, is the superhuman feats they accomplished. The labors of Heracles do not need to be rehearsed here, nor the world of thought inhabited by Empedocles, Plato, and Socrates; Lysander as commander of the Spartan fleet attained the greatest pinnacle of power that was available in his age; Bellerophon, a Corinthian, slew the Chimera, then defeated the ferocious Solymnes, and killed many of the Amazons; Ajax, son of Telamon, the king of Salamis, commander of the Achaeans’ left wing in their camp at Troy, was one of the most powerful and most prominent of the besieging warriors. All these named have grandness, heroism, and extraordinariness in common, but not just that. The seamier side of their lives, if one may call it that, was likewise above the average.
Ajax was rendered invulnerable in childhood by none other than Heracles. He went mad after he was, in his view unlawfully, deprived of Achilles’ armor, which then ended up in the hands of crafty Odysseus. He swore vengeance against the Greeks, but Athena dimmed his eyesight, and instead of his brothers in arms he slaughtered a flock of sheep grazing near the camp. When he recovered his wits, he was unable to bear the shame and committed suicide. Ajax, as Sophocles writes, was “a prisoner of his own unalterable destiny” (Ajax, 250): he bore a human nature inside himself, but he could not contain his desires within this natural boundary. As the strongest warrior, he surpassed everyone else; he rejected the assistance offered by Athena, trusting that he would succeed in battle on his own, unaided. His strength and splendid heroism, however, isolated him from others; hence, the mocking he is subjected to and the incomprehension by which he is surrounded. It was not his wits but his physical prowess that made Ajax famous; yet the predominance of his physical strength was enough to throw his mind off balance and off course, and so “devouring his lonely heart he sits” (613). He “lies whelmed by a storm / of turbid wildering fury” (206–7), his concubine, Tecmessa, says of the delirious Ajax, who, on regaining his senses, realized that his world had been irreparably shattered: the dignity of his physical excellence was coupled with a sense of pettiness (after all, was it not feebleness to go crazy over mere weapons?). That mental pettiness, however, was also a sign of immoderation: anyone flying into such a rage and wanting something badly enough to go mad must ignore the customary order of the world. He had lost his honor not only in the eyes of men but of the gods also, who had induced a fit of madness in him. Looking at it from Ajax’s point of view, though, his condition could also be interpreted as meaning that for him people had ceased to exist, had lost their importance just as much as the gods had. Putting the words of Sophocles into his mouth: “Receive me now no more worthy to seek help of the gods, / Nor any more from fellow mortal men to claim kindness” (397–99). He had lost all connection with earthly beings and also with the celestial world, ending up outside the universe: “