Melancholy: The Metamorphoses of Depression

The book opens with a brief introduction — the word melancholy is presented as an ancient "monument" more than two thousand years old, onto which every era has layered new meaning; the author stresses that there is no single reality called "melancholy," only the history of the word and the layers of meaning it has accrued.

Chapter 1 ("The Anatomy of Melancholy") begins by tracing the word's roots to ancient Greece — "melankholia" derives from "khole" (bile) and "melas" (black), and was used as early as the 4th century BCE by Hippocrates (or his son-in-law Polybus) as part of the four-humors theory of the body (blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm).

The book shows that what "black bile" actually was has never been precisely established — the ancient Greeks associated it with dark vomit and the spleen, but the author emphasizes it remained an almost abstract substance, "never observed" directly, drawing its real power instead from the metaphorical weight it carried as a word.

Through mythological examples (tragic heroes like Heracles and Ajax), the book shows that melancholy was linked from the start to both illness and tragic grandeur — in Sophocles' account, Ajax becomes a symbolic figure who sheds "black blood" before taking his own life.

The chapter's most notable section is devoted to the text known as "Problem XXX," attributed to Aristotle — the first text to interpret melancholy not as an illness but as a mark of genius, attempting to explain why so many outstanding figures in philosophy, statecraft, poetry, and the arts were visibly melancholic.

The chapter thus lays out the book's core thesis early: melancholy was never merely a medical category — it also lived in parallel as a cultural metaphor tied to creativity and genius, a dual legacy the book traces through its remaining chapters (the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Romanticism).

• The classic format of the Gallimard "Découvertes" series — every page pairs text with large, high-quality reproductions of artworks (ancient ceramics, Renaissance engravings)
• The main text is written in a chronological, encyclopedic tone, avoiding academic jargon in favor of an accessible, warm register for a general audience
• Short factual sidebars and quotations (from sources like Hippocrates and Sophocles) run alongside the main text on every page
• The book closes (per the series' standard structure) with a "Documents" section of primary-source excerpts and an extensive index