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 undertook to obtain possession of the oxen of the Thessalian prince Iphiclus. As Melampus had foretold, he was caught and imprisoned, but was released by Phylacus (the father of Iphiclus) on giving proof of his powers of divination, and was finally presented with the oxen as a reward for having restored the virility of the son. Melampus subsequently obtained a share in the kingdom of Argos in return for having cured the daughters of its king Proetus, who had been driven mad for offering resistance to the worship of Dionysus or for stealing the gold from the statue of Hera. At Aegosthena in Megara there was a sanctuary of Melampus, and an annual festival was held in his honour. According to Herodotus, he introduced the cult of Dionysus into Greece from Egypt, and his name (“black foot”) is probably “a symbolical expression of his character as a Bacchic propitiatory priest and seer” (Preller). According to the traditional explanation, he was so called from his foot having been tanned by exposure to the sun when a boy. In his character of physician, he was the reputed discoverer of the herb melampodium, a kind of hellebore. Melampus and Bias are symbolical representatives of cunning and force.

 MELANCHLAENI (from Gr. , and  , “Blackcloaks”), an ancient tribe to the north of Scythia, probably about the modern Ryazan and Tambov (Herodotus iv. 106). They have been identified with the Finnish tribes Merja (now extinct) and Cheremis, now driven north-east on to the middle Volga. These, till recently, wore black. There has been confusion between this tribe and another of the same name mentioned by Pliny (N. H. vi. 15), and Ptolemy in the Caucasus.

MELANCHOLY (Gr. , from  , black, and  , bile), originally a condition of the mind or body due to a supposed excess of black bile, also this black bile itself, one of the chief “humours” of the body, which were, according to medieval physiology, blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy (see ); now a vague term for desponding grief. From the 17th century the name was used of the mental disease now known as “melancholia” (see ), but without any reference to the supposed cause of it.

MELANCHTHON, PHILIPP (1497–1560), German theologian and reformer, was born at Bretten in Baden on the 16th of February 1497. His father, George Schwartzerd, was an armourer under the Palatinate princes. His mother, Barbara Reuter, a niece of Johann Reuchlin, was shrewd, thrifty and affectionate. Her father, Johann Reuter, long burgomaster of Bretten, supervised the education of Philipp, who was taught first by Johannes Hungarus and then by Georg Simler at the academy of Pfortzheim. Reuchlin took an interest in him, and, following a contemporary custom, named him Melanchthon (the Greek form of Schwartzerd, black earth). In October 1509 he went to Heidelberg, where he took the B.A. degree, afterwards proceeding M.A. at Tübingen. The only other academic distinction he accepted was the B.D. of Wittenberg (1519). He would never consent to become a “doctor,” because he thought the title carried with it responsibilities to which he felt himself unequal. At Tübingen he lived as student and teacher for six years, until on Reuchlin’s advice, the elector of Saxony called him to Wittenberg as professor of Greek in 1518.

This appointment marked an epoch in German university education; Wittenberg became the school of the nation; the scholastic methods of instruction were set aside, and in a Discourse on Reforming the Studies of Youth Melanchthon gave proof, not only that he had caught the Renaissance spirit, but that he was fitted to become one of its foremost leaders. He began to lecture on Homer and the Epistle to Titus, and in connexion with the former he announced that, like Solomon, he sought Tyrian brass and gems for the adornment of God’s Temple. Luther received a fresh impulse towards the study of Greek, and his translation of the Scriptures, begun as early as 1517, now made rapid progress, Melanchthon helping to collate the Greek versions and revising Luther’s translation. Melanchthon felt the spell of Luther’s personality and spiritual depth, and seems to have been prepared on his first arrival at Wittenberg to accept the new theology, which as yet existed mainly in subjective form in the person of Luther. To reduce it to an objective system, to exhibit it dialectically, the calmer mind of Melanchthon was requisite.

Melanchthon was first drawn into the arena of the Reformation controversy through the Leipzig Disputation (June 27–July 8, 1519), at which he was present. He had been reproved by Johann Eck for giving aid to Carlstadt (“Tace tu, Philippe, ac tua studia cura nec me perturba”), and he was shortly afterwards himself attacked by the great papal champion. Melanchthon replied in a brief and moderately worded treatise, setting forth Luther’s first principle of the supreme authority of Scripture in opposition to the patristic writings on which Eck relied. His marriage in 1520 to Catharine Krapp of Wittenberg gave a domestic centre to the Reformation. In 1521, during Luther’s confinement in the Wartburg, Melanchthon was leader of the Reformation cause at the university. He defended the action of Carlstadt, when he dispensed the Eucharist in an “evangelical fashion.”

With the arrival of the Anabaptist enthusiasts of Zwickau, he had a more difficult task, and appears to have been irresolute. Their attacks on infant baptism seemed to him not altogether irrational, and in regard to their claim to personal inspiration he said “Luther alone can decide; on the one hand let us beware of quenching the Spirit of God, and on the other of being led astray by the spirit of Satan.” In the same year, 1521, he published his Loci communes rerum theologicarum, the first systematized presentation of the reformed theology. From 1522 to 1524 he was busy with the translation of the Bible and in publishing commentaries. In 1524 he went for reasons of health into southern Germany and was urged by the papal legate Campegio to renounce the new doctrines. He refused, and maintained his refusal by publishing his Summa doctrinae Lutheri.

After the first Diet of Spires (1526), where a precarious peace was patched up for the reformed faith, Melanchthon was deputed as one of twenty-eight commissioners to visit the reformed states and regulate the constitution of churches, he having just published a famous treatise called the Libellus visitatorius, a directory for the use of the commissioners. At the Marburg conference (1529) between the German and Swiss reformers, Luther was pitted against Oecolampadius and Melanchthon against Zwingli in the discussion regarding the real presence in the sacrament. How far the normally conciliatory spirit of Melanchthon was here biased by Luther’s intolerance is evident from the exaggerated accounts of the conference written by the former to the elector of Saxony. He was at this time even more embittered than Luther against the Zwinglians. At the Diet of Augsburg (1530) Melanchthon was the leading representative of the reformation, and it was he who prepared for that diet the seventeen articles of the Evangelical faith, which are known as the “Augsburg Confession.” He held conferences with Roman divines appointed to adjust differences, and afterwards wrote an Apology for the Augsburg Confession. After the Augsburg