John Dowland inexplicably was not hired by Queen Elizabeth I when she had an opening in 1594, so he needed to seek employment abroad. After brief periods of German court service and a trip to Italy, Dowland settled into a lengthy position of musical service to King Christian IV of Denmark. Sometime during his tenure in Denmark, he apparently composed a series of pieces for string consort, based upon his famous lute solo Lachrimae. The solo, Dowland's adaptation of it into the song Flow, my tears, and his set of consort pieces, together fueled his public melancholic image and show Dowland expressing pathos in an extroverted, dramatic manner, much in fashion at the time. His pathos may also be related to his very employment disappointments at home. In fact, when he published the entire collection in 1604 (the year after Elizabeth's death), he dedicated it to the new Queen of England, the sister of his Danish employer, in an apparent attempt to finagle the attention of James I.

The Lachrimae antiquae opens Dowland's 1604 print, the Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans. The entire collection consists of seven pavans (stylized dance forms) based upon the Lachrimae solo and a variety of other consort pieces; all are printed in "table" format, such that the five players may read from the same pages, seated opposite one another around a table. Lachimae antiquae is the closest musically to the original lute solo, and thus can stand on its own as well as function within the complete cycle of "seven tears." On its own, Lachrimae antiquae is a setting for five strings (viols or possibly violins) of the pavan; it divides conventionally into three repeated strains. The dominant melodic feature of the entire piece is the descending fourth motive that forms the first melody and pervades the polyphony; that very gesture has been called a "standard emblem of grief." Tonally, Lachrimae antiquae plods through a depressing series of minor and Phrygian harmonies.

But the piece also should be seen as the opening gambit of its cycle. As such, it sets the tone and pace for a larger group of pieces that have been viewed variously as a dramatic exposition of "Melancholy," a neo-Platonist soul-allegory, or even a quasi-religious alternative to the Seven Penitential Psalms; an apparent musical quotation from a Lassus setting of the Penitential Psalms may be pertinent to its interpretation.

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