For the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, there is no mental pain like despair. So sharp is the suffering it brings that Robert Burton turns to visual art to hint at its extent. The ancient Greek painter Timanthes depicted the scene in Homer’s Iliad (also the subject of a play by Euripides) when the Greeks are about to carry out the demand of the goddess Artemis: they must sacrifice the young princess Iphigenia in order to appease the deity’s anger, so that she will make the winds favourable for the Greek fleet to sail to Troy (Figure 6.1). The grief-stricken face of Iphigenia’s father, King Agamemnon, remains hidden in the painting because it is beyond the expressive powers of art.