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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
LÁSZLÓ F. FÖLDÉNYI
(b. 1952) studied English and Hungarian philology and the philosophy of art in Budapest and spent several years in Germany and the Netherlands. He is now a professor at the University of Theatre, Film, and Television, Budapest, and holds the chair in the theory of art. His books on literature, art, and the history of ideas have been translated into more than ten languages. He has won many literary prizes in Germany und Hungary, including the highest state honor in Hungary, the Széchenyi Prize. In 2009, he was elected to the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. He lives with his American-born wife, an architect, in Budapest, and has two daughters and a son.
TIM WILKINSON’S
translations include books by distinguished Hungarian historians such as Éva H. Balázs,
Hungary and the Habsburgs 1765–1800
, and Victor Karady,
The Jews of Europe in the Modern Era
, as well as works by literary memoirists and novelists such as Tibor Déry, Gyula Illyés, Dezső Kosztolányi, and Sándor Márai. He is the main English-language translator for Imre Kertész.
ALBERTO MANGUEL
is a Canadian writer, translator, editor, and critic. Born in Buenos Aires, he has since resided in Israel, Argentina, Europe, the South Pacific, and Canada. He now lives in New York.
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1. The ancient Greeks, like Indian cultures, perceived a transition, not a chasm, between living organisms (plants, animals, humankind, gods), as is demonstrated by numerous mythological tales, and accordingly, in the case of man they emphasized existence rather than individuality.
2. To the point that in the opinion of Hippocrates, melancholia, if associated with inflammation of the diaphragm (paraphrenitis), could favorably influence the healing of hemorrhoids.
3. Although he does not dwell on it, he mentions the melancholic habitude (
) and, anticipating a later point of view, regards the ailment as of general validity in the case of certain people, thereby raising it out of the sphere of illness.
4. 
denotes mental power, will, demeanor, courage, passion, and soul.
5. Perhaps that metaphysical solitude explains why Heracles plays a negligible role in Homeric epics, which designate people’s place in society in a complex way.
6. Herodotus noticed that Heracles, on account of his dual nature, was worshipped equally as a hero and as a god, and Diodorus Siculus names the specific places: at Opus and Thebes he was revered as a hero, whereas in Athens as a god.
7. The word 
as also used by Aristotle means “extraordinariness” as well as “unevenness.”
8. Orphics regarded the counsels of the dark, unlighted night as the most profound sources of wisdom.
9. In Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, “The Song of Melancholy” (ch. 74) is likewise heard with the onset of night.
10. This is a matter of melancholic heroes: the ancients prescribed numerous medicines for the melancholia of “ordinary” lunatics (the best known of those was the plant called hellebore, to which great curative power was attributed even in the nineteenth century). The mythological interpretation of melancholia and madness indicates the irresolvability, the “incurability,” inherent in both, and it is to be incorporated into the stricter interpretation of melancholia and madness that is valid to the present day.
11. “For eyes, and ears, and feet, are mine,” says the soothsayer Theoclymenus in the Odyssey (bk. 20, 365, trans. William Maginn); according to mystery religions, vision and audition are particular endowments of the initiated.
12. 
, theophrast: a god conveyor. Aeschylus describes Cassandra thus in his play Agamemnon.
13. Aristotle likewise indicates the inner feelings nourished by the gods with the verb “to foretell”: 
.
14. In his Poetics, Aristotle expounds that a dramatist must himself be sensible of the sufferings of his protagonists; the dramatist is a 
, prophet; thus here, too, a prophet’s chief task is not to divulge things that are to come, but to uncover the laws of existence.
15. In his Geography, Strabo describes the case of an Indian, a Brahmin, who laughed as he committed himself to the flames in Eleusis (!) and on whose tomb was this inscription: “Zarmonochegas, an Indian, a native of Bargos, having immortalized himself according to the custom of his country, here lies” (bk. 15, pt. 1, 73.). The same mode of self-immolation was chosen by Croesus, the last king of Lydia (who, incidentally, considered himself to be a descendant of Heracles), and the Phoenicians Hamilkar and Sardanapalus, who hoped for resurrection for themselves and their people by doing so.
16. Josephus Flavius in Antiquities of the Jews calls the rite of death by fire “the resurrection of Heracles”; moreover, in some places Heracles was worshipped as a sun god.
17. That notion was preserved by Christianity: in the New Testament, John the Baptist said that Jesus would “baptize [people] with the Holy Spirit” (Mark 1:8), and in some versions also with fire.
18. The Greek word equivalent to “truth” is 
, meaning “not subjected to forgetting,” that is, removed from the dominion of Lethe.
19. According to Galen, the gall bladder was an organum plenum mysterii—an “organ full of mystery”—just like melancholia, which is the epitome of mystery.
20. Admittedly in another context, Heidegger in Being and Time noted the predatory nature of the notion of truth.
21. Schopenhauer was only partially correct in seeing the aim of the ancient mysteries in the elect being separated from the mass. He was striving to discern the elitist attitudes of his own age in antiquity.
22. That is meant literally in the case of the Mithraic mysteries: initiates symbolically ascend through the planetary spheres to the sun god Mithras.
23. Premature death, for instance, is 
in Greek.
24. One might add that the Greeks did not have a doctrine of redemption that was of general validity.
25. Hölderlin associates her name with light on the basis of the word