Ii1
Amicorum communia omnia
Between friends all is common
EDITOR —This adage is listed in the back-of-book index of Barker's selection but appears only as a brief reference within another essay rather than as a standalone entry.
by Desiderius Erasmus
Fifty-eight proverbs from Erasmus's Renaissance compendium of 4,151 classical adages — each with Latin, English, and Erasmus's commentary. A random draw, then seven instructive games: match the Latin, diagnose your situation, pair the opposites, apply it today, Festina lente, the rhetorician, and your own commonplace book.
tags: adages, proverbs, erasmus, renaissance, classical, rhetoric, humanism, wisdom
Perfacile est aiunt proverbia scribere ;
Haud nego, sed durum est scribere chiliadas.It is easy, they say, to write a proverb;
Granted — but hard to write chiliads of them.— Erasmus, on the composition of this work
Erasmus' Adagia is a Renaissance compendium of ancient proverbs — Greek, Latin, biblical — each with a commentary explaining its origin and intended use. Many short, a few essays. The work that gave Europe phrases like Know thyself, Pandora's box, and To call a spade a spade. The page below renders fifty-eight of them as working apparatus.
Erasmus's Adagia is the most influential single book of the Northern Renaissance. Published first in 1500 with about eight hundred entries, it grew across his life to over four thousand. Each entry is a classical proverb (Greek, Latin, occasionally biblical) followed by a commentary that explains its origin and intended use — short for most, an essay for a few. The work was a school of rhetorical authority for two hundred years; it gave the European languages phrases like know thyself, Pandora's box, call a spade a spade, and make haste slowly. Below: a random adage of the moment, then seven games designed in the Renaissance spirit of the commonplace book — the proverb is the move that names the situation, and the reader is trained by collecting the situations alongside.
A random adage, with Erasmus's own commentary. Press ↻ Draw another to cycle through the fifty-eight in this selection.
Amicorum communia omnia
Between friends all is common
EDITOR —This adage is listed in the back-of-book index of Barker's selection but appears only as a brief reference within another essay rather than as a standalone entry.
This selection of fifty-eight adages is drawn from William Barker's annotated edition of The Adages of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2001), which itself condenses the Collected Works of Erasmus volumes 31–34 and 36 — translations chiefly by Margaret Mann Phillips and R.A.B. Mynors. Erasmus's complete Adagia contains 4,151 proverbs; the selection here is heavily weighted toward the longer commentaries, where Erasmus broke out from antiquarian explication into the essays that earned the book its place in the Northern Renaissance.
Each adage on this page carries its citation (e.g., I i 69) — volume number, chiliad letter, adage number — in the system Erasmus used himself. Chiliad is from the Greek chilias (a thousand); the work was conceived in chiliads of a thousand adages each. The seven games above turn the page into the working object Erasmus actually intended: not an antiquarian curiosity, but a school of rhetorical attention.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI
Between friends all is common. ") is part of Erasmus's catalogue of adages. Many entries in the Adagia compendium are brief glosses or cross-references rather than full essays.