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 particulars panel, a random adage, two featured commentaries from Erasmus's hand (one a peace polemic, one on mortality), Aldus's printer's mark - then twelve 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.
The most famous of the long commentaries - Erasmus's lifelong motto, his praise of Aldus, and the proverb that became a printer's mark. The full text below; this is what the Adagia actually looked like.
This proverb begins the second series of a thousand proverbs. It is one of the longest essays, a fascinating mix of research, speculation, and personal history, greatly expanded from a tiny note in Collectanea no and worked on in successive editions of the Adages. It was also seen by Erasmus as a form of mock eulogy. In Foundations of the Abundant Style (the De copia) he describes this essay in part as a rhetorical performance of playful 'cleverness': 'Thus Favorinus eulogized fever, Synesius baldness, myself folly (in my Mo- riae encomium), and I also extolled Aldus' anchor in the Adagia' (CWE Aldus, or Aldo Manuzio (c was a brilliant Venetian scholar-printer who produced many beautiful editions of the classics as well as of contemporary works. See pp xiii-xiv. The image of the dolphin and anchor had appeared in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, printed by Aldus in (Erasmus seems to refer specifically to this text below; see illustration on p had a long tradition in emblem literature and, because of Aldus, is still famous as a printer's mark. In the English-speaking world, it was used by British publisher William Pickering in the early nineteenth century and in the twentieth century by Dent in the Everyman series and by the U.S. publisher Doubleday. The adage (Tilley H was very popular in its Latin and Greek forms, was also varied in the medieval collections, and has moved into other European languages (listed in Tosi who mentions the modern German Eile mit Weile, a rhyming oxymoron). An interesting counter-sentence from the Renaissance is Friar Laurence's too cautious 'Wisely and slow, they stum- ble that run fast' (Romeo and Juliet
Extract from the 1508 chiliad commentary. Erasmus opens by praising the proverb, then turns to the medals of Augustus and the dolphin-and-anchor.
Make haste slowly. This proverb has at first sight an agreeable touch of the riddle about it, made up as it is of contra- dictory words. It must therefore take its place in a particular class which I pointed out at the beginning of this work - those which are expressed by enantiosis, the contrast of opposites, of which Infelix felicitas, Unhappy happiness, would be an example. Make haste slowly The title page of the edition of the Adages, with the anchor and dolphin mark of Aldus Manutius. Aldus' short address to the studious reader praises the labour that has gone into the book and ends wittily with two Greek proverbs: Here's Rhodes: let's see you jump (in iii and He is his own flute-player (n v (Houghton Library, Harvard University) And I should think it a reasonable guess, were someone to suppose that it started from that phrase in the Knights of Aristophanes, 'Make haste with speed/ that is, propera propere, the man who alluded to it [in the corresponding expression], whoever he was, hav- ing substituted an enantiosis for the anadiplosis, the forcible doubling of the same idea. This effective use of the contrast, and the neatness of the allusion, acquire not a little further grace from such apt and utter brevity, which seems to me somehow to have a special value of its own in adages, as in seal-rings, and makes them all the more admired and valued. If you consider the vigour and wealth of meaning embodied in these few brief words, so pregnant, so authoritative, so wholesome, so widely applicable to the whole range of human life, you will easily agree with me that in this great company of proverbs no other so richly deserves to be inscribed on every pillar, written up over the gate of every church (yes, and in letters of gold!), painted on the great doors of princes' courts, graven on the seal-rings of prelates and figured on the sceptres of kings - it should, in a word, be brought before the eye on all public buildings everywhere and become widespread and familiar, as something which ought ideally to be always present in every man's mind and never very far from men's eyes. For there is no mortal creature who would not greatly profit by it, and especially princes and those to whom, if I may borrow Homer's 'peoples are given in trust, and many the cares that beset them.' For men of humble station, if they are idle and fail to do something, or headstrong and make a mistake, do far less damage and any unfortunate results are more easily set right. But one fit of idleness in a prince, one rash decision - just think what storms it sometimes raises and what ruin it can bring with it into the affairs of men! If on the other hand to make haste slowly is not forgotten, which means the right timing and the right degree, governed alike by vigilance and patience, so that nothing regrettable is done through haste, and nothing left undone through sloth that may contribute to the wellbeing of the commonwealth, could any government be more prosperous, more stable and firmly-rooted than this? - though this prosperity is by no means limited by its actual boundaries, but spreads everywhere far and wide among neighbour- ing peoples, so that nowhere is there more truth in that remark of 'An evil neighbour is as great a bane / As a good one's a boon/ And so my personal opinion is that if ever a proverb truly deserved the name of royal, this is the one, not only for the reasons I have given but because the spirit of princes seems especially close to these two faults. The favour of fortune, great possessions, every incitement to luxury ready to hand, complete liberty to do as one pleases; above all, the plaudits of the toadies that are so corrupting, and the ap- proval, the applause and congratulations that await everything they do or say whatever it may be like - it is not surprising, I say, that all this and more of the kind makes some princes lazy, most of all if this soothing treatment is lavished on youth and youth's constant companion, inexperience. Conversely, it happens sometimes that the inborn vigour natural to a prince, and his lion-like spirit, if I may so express it, increased by ample resources, stimulated by success in great enterprises, fired perhaps by anger or ambition or other such desires and sharpened by bloodthirsty counsellors - all this sometimes sweeps them off their course and carries princes themselves and the whole mass of their dominions to the edge of the abyss. Though if one must make a mistake in one direction or the other, it will be much better for a king to be too slow than to be over-hasty. Homer seems to have given his Agamemnon some reprehensible kind of soft-heartedness, which is the 'slowly' of our proverb, so that no valiant deed or show of spirit is reported of him, except for his anger when Chryseis was taken from him, and his seizure of Briseis who belonged to Achilles. On the other hand he makes Achilles too rash and headstrong, in fact gives him our 'Make haste'; unless anyone thinks it was 'making haste slowly' when he drew his sword in the council and made for the king, and had to be restrained by who told him to confine his anger to abusive words. And yet to go even that far showed a complete lack of self-control - in a crowded session of the princes to break out with such a flow of curses and open abuse against the man who held supreme command. Achilles seems to have served as a model for Alexander the Great, who indeed outdid him; for he was driven so headlong by his passions that he drew his sword even against his dearest friends. Sardanapalus imitated Agamemnon, and so success- fully that he far surpassed him. In fact it is possible to find an infinite number of each kind, reproducing the sloth of one or the ferocity of the other; but you would discover very few who have followed our proverb and found the right mixture of well-timed speed and wise deliberation. One man perhaps may stand for many, the famous Fabius Maximus who was actually nicknamed Cunctator, Old Steady-does-it, who not only won immortal glory for himself but by his 'slow, slow tactics saved the Roman which the ill-advised haste of other generals had by then brought into the greatest jeopardy. I can see therefore that it was not without reason if our 'Make haste slowly' appealed so much to two Roman emperors - and those two easily the most highly thought of among them all - Octavius Augustus and Titus Vespasian. There was a lofty spirit in them both beyond the common run, coupled with a remarkable gentleness and easiness in personal relations, such that, after winning all hearts by their friendly and gracious demeanour, none the less, when the situation called for a strong man, they rapidly solved the greatest problems. Augustus in consequence was so devoted to this saying, as Aulus Gellius tells us in the Attic Nights, book chapter i, followed by Macrobius in book 6 of the Saturnalia, that he used it freely in his daily conversation and often included it in his letters, using these two words as a spur to encourage 'the concurrent application to business of rapid energy and meticulous care.' Gellius thinks this is expressed in Latin by a single word matura, ripe. For we call things 'ripe' that happen neither prematurely nor later than the proper time, but just when they should: and Virgil used the word in this sense when he wrote in the first book of the Aeneid The time is ripe to flee.' Though in general this word maturare is used in good authors in the sense of festinare, to hasten, subject to the proviso that, hasten though you may, you do not anticipate the proper time; for you could rightly call things done prematurely festinata, but not maturata. This agrees with what Suetonius" tells us in his life of Augustus: 'He thought nothing more out of place in the finished general than to be hasty and rash, and often used to repeat the familiar words yap ear' d/xei'ycoy rj Opao-vs I So says Suetonius. It is a line of verse, trochaic tetrameter catalectic, taken from some I suppose, to which Caesar added the last word out of his own head. The sense is 'Make haste slowly. For he who achieves a result slowly and without a mistake is better than someone rash and self-confident/ What is foreseen and planned at leisure is safer than what is done in a hurry and planned in haste. Again, Vespasian's approval of our maxim can easily be inferred from very ancient coins issued by him, one of which I was allowed to inspect by Aldo It was struck in silver from ancient dies clearly of Roman date, and he said it had been a present to him from Pietro Bembo, a Venetian patrician, a young man who was not only a scholar of distinction but a most industrious explorer of the whole field of ancient literature. The design of the coin was as follows. One side showed the head of Vespasian with an inscription, the other an anchor, the central shaft of which had a dolphin coiled round it. Now the only meaning conveyed by this symbol is that favourite maxim of the emperor Augustus 'Make haste slowly'; and this we learn from the ancient texts relating to hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics is the name given to those enigmatic designs so much used in the early centuries, especially among the priest-prophets and theologians in Egypt, who thought it quite wrong to express the mys- teries of wisdom in ordinary writing and thus expose them, as we do, to the uninitiated public. What they thought worth knowing they would record by drawing the shapes of various animals and inanimate things, in such a way that it was not easy for the casual reader to unravel them forthwith. It was necessary first to learn the properties of individual things and the special force and nature of each separate creature; and the man who had really penetrated these could alone interpret the symbols and put them together, and thus solve the riddle of their meaning. For example, when the Egyptians wish to denote their god Osiris, whom they identify with the sun, 'they represent a sceptre and draw on it the outline of an eye,' to indicate of course that Osiris is a god, enjoys a king's exalted power, and can see everything, because the ancients used to call the sun Jove's eye. Something of the sort is recorded by Macrobius in the first book of his Saturnalia. The year they represented like this: they drew a serpent coiled into a ring so that it held its own tail in its mouth, suggesting how with the same changing round of seasons the year always returns upon itself. Hence (so Servius maintains) the Greeks gave the year the name eniautos, and Virgil had this in mind when he wrote 'Round its old track returns the rolling year/ Though Horus the author of two Mfl/ce /wste slowly This image of the anchor and the dolphin, discussed by Erasmus at u i i*, appeared in a description of hieroglyphics by Francesco Colonna in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Poliphilus' Strife of Love in a Dream), here in the edition published by Aldus Manutius in (sig dyr). The signs at the top represent patience and the combined form at the bottom is interpreted, as Erasmus tells us, as aie speude bradeds: always (circle) hasten (dolphin) slowly (anchor). (Houghton Library, Harvard University) books which still survive on symbols of this kind, tells us that the serpent-image represents time and not the year; the symbol for a year is sometimes an image of Isis and sometimes of a phoenix. The same question was considered by Plutarch in his essay 'On Osiris/ and among the Greeks by Chaeremon, according to from whose works are excerpted, I suspect, the records of this sort of thing which I have seen lately. These included among other things a design to this effect: a circle to begin with, then an anchor, the middle of which, as I have said, has the twisted body of a dolphin twined around it. According to the explanation which was attached, the circle as having neither beginning nor end represents eternity. The anchor, which holds back and ties down the ship and binds it fast, indicates slowness. The dolphin, as the fastest and in its motions most agile of living creatures, expresses speed. If then you skilfully connect these three, they will make up some such principle as 'Ever hasten slowly/ What is more, this kind of symbolic expression is not only of venerable antiquity, it has a charm of its own for anyone who, as I said above, has fully mastered the properties of things; and this result is achieved partly by the careful examination of things and their natural causes, and partly by acquiring a good knowledge of the humanities. Suppose for example that one were to obtain from that book of Aristotle's which he called his Lectures on Physics a firm grasp of the existence of some relation and resemblance between magnitude, mo- tion, and time, because each of these three exists equally in the same object. Just as time is inseparable from motion, so motion is inseparable from magnitude. What a point is in magnitude, a moment is in time, and an impulse in motion (if I may use that word provisionally for the smallest quantum of motion, which is indivisible; for we need not trouble ourselves about names, provided we are agreed on the thing). Suppose then that you were to consider magnitude in a straight line; you will find two points, one of which is solely the beginning and the other exclusively the end - the points from which, as it were, length starts to run and in which it stops. Now set up motion in that same straight line, and you will equally find two impulses, with one of which the motion begins and in the other it finishes. It is basic to these that the initial impulse is nothing except the beginning of that motion, and the concluding impulse is nothing except its conclusion. Motion must of necessity be associated with time; for time is as it were the measure of it, and if you were to contemplate its nature in abstraction you can find two moments (if I may so put it), one of which is the beginning of that space of time and the other its end. But now suppose that in the same line you consider the points of magnitude, the impulses of motion and the moments of time which lie between the beginning and the end: you can see that each of them has a sort of dual nature. Considered in reference to the beginning, they are ends; considered in relation to the end, they are beginnings. Moreover, when the magnitude comes to an end, at the same place and time the motion ends and the time also must be ended. But a magnitude which has a beginning of such a kind that it cannot also be the end, and an end of such a kind that it cannot be considered as a beginning, must be finite; and this we find in all shapes except that of the circle or the sphere. In this there is no definite point which can properly be called a beginning, and nothing which can be called an end in the sense that it is the only thing so called; and in the same way there is no moment and no impulse of which this can be true. Hence it follows that in this shape there is no finite magnitude, no finite motion, and no finite time. Again, when any point of magnitude you like to take is at the same moment a beginning and an end, magnitude must of necessity be unlimited. And by the same reasoning, when an impulse you choose can be either a beginning of motion or an end, there motion is clearly unlimited. Finally, when any moment you choose can be simultaneously either a beginning of time or an end, there time must be unlimited. But time unlimited we call eternity, and this corresponds to eternal motion; eternal motion requires mag- nitude which is also eternal or infinite. These considerations do not apply to any magnitude that is not spherical or circular. Hence certain philosophers have inferred the eternity of the universe, because they observed that the heavens as a whole and the heavenly bodies are spherical in shape, and their motion also is spherical. And so not only does the principle of the circle agree with magnitude of this kind; but the motion inherent in it is also a kind of circle. Likewise the time by which this motion is measured can be called circular, as Aristotle also avers in the fourth book of his Lectures on Physics. Anyone therefore who has mastered all this and more of the same kind from the study of philosophy will easily form an idea why it was that the Egyptians chose a circle to represent everlasting time. Now let us briefly consider the significance and nature of the dol- phin. The authorities tell us that with its incredible speed and amaz- ingly vigorous movement it leaves all other living creatures far be- hind. Thus Oppian in his second book on the nature of fishes com- pares dolphins, not with birds of any ordinary kind, but with the eagle: As in the fowls of the air there is no king but the eagle, Over carnivorous beasts the monarch of all is the lion, Just as in things that crawl the mastery lies with the viper, Even so by his onrush the dolphin is lord of the fishes. He also compares it to a projectile: 'For they fly through the sea like an arrow,' and even finally with the wind, or rather, with a whirlwind or hurricane: 'Sometimes it darts through the deep sea-wave like a whirl- wind.' Pliny in his History of the World, book 9 chapter 8, accepting the view of Aristotle, gives an account which at no point differs from this. The dolphin, he says, is the fastest of all living creatures, and not only among those which live in the sea; it is faster than any bird and has a higher velocity than any missile. And its exceptional speed can be inferred from one piece of evidence in particular: the fact that, though its mouth is a long way from its snout - in fact, half way down its belly, which must necessarily be a considerable handicap to it in catching fish, for it cannot seize them unless it turns over on its back - yet hardly any fish is fast enough to get away from it. Nor is the creature itself unaware of this natural gift; but as though to secure admiration, or to amuse itself, it sometimes races ships in full sail. For the dolphin is exceptionally fond of man (some say of boys in particular), and it is therefore a mortal enemy of the crocodile, which is more hostile to man than any other animal. And so it does not fear man as something alien, but comes to meet vessels and plays exultantly round them - races them even and passes them, however great their spread of canvas. Moreover, when chasing mullet in Lake Laterna, it gives a splendid exhibition of its speed and skill, and also of its goodwill towards mankind. And how can I describe its thrust, which almost defies belief? When, spurred on by hunger, it has pursued a fleeing fish down to the bottom and has held its breath for some time, it rushes up to breathe like an arrow shot from a bow, and leaps out of the water with such force that often it will clear a ship's canvas swollen by the wind at a single bound. To express that eager and tireless spirit, what symbol could be more appropriate than the dolphin? To convey the idea of slowness and hesitation the fish they call echenfrs, the Latin remora, was not but its shape was thought too difficult to recognize (for apart from its small size, it has no distinguishing mark), and so for this purpose the anchor was preferred as an emblem, which, if sailing is rendered dangerous by high following winds, ties down the ship's excessive speed and holds it fast. It is clear then that this saying, Make haste slowly, arose in the secret heart of ancient philosophy; whence it was called into their service by two of the most highly esteemed of all Roman emperors, one of whom used it as a device and the other as an emblem, so well did it agree with the character and disposition of both. And now it has passed to Aldo Manuzio, citizen of Rome, as a kind of heir in the third generation, 'for so methinks heaven's power and purpose It is he that gives fresh celebrity to the same device that was once approved by Vespasian. And it is not only most familiar, it is also highly popular among all those everywhere in the world to whom sound learning is either familiar or dear. Nor do I think this symbol was more illustrious then, when it was stamped on the imperial coinage and suffered the wear and tear of circulation as it passed from one merchant to another, than it is now, when in every nation, even outside the limits of any Christian empire, it spreads and wins recognition, it is held fast and prized in company with books of all kinds in both the ancient lan- guages, by all who are devoted to the cult of liberal studies. I think especially of those who despise the barbarous and uncouth learning of our own day and aspire to that true knowledge stemming from antiquity, for the restoration of which this man was surely born - was made and modelled, so to say, by the fates themselves. Such is his burning devotion to this single end, such is his tireless zeal, so great his readiness to shoulder any burden, so that their supply of texts may be restored, complete and genuine and uncorrupted, to all intelligent men of good will. How great the influence he has already exercised in this direction, although with fate (I would almost say) against him, the facts are there to prove. And if only some deity that favours good literature would give a fair wind to the noble, the positively royal ambitions of my friend Aldus - 'if only hostile powers give - I can promise students a great future in the next few years. Everything in the way of good authors in four languages - Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldaean - and in every field of study will be at their disposal, complete and correct, through this one man's efforts, and none of them will any longer feel the lack of any part of his literary heritage. And when that moment comes, it will then be clear what a wealth of good manuscripts is still lying hid, either concealed by neglect or kept secret by some men's ambition, whose only motive is the wish to have an apparent monopoly of knowledge. Then at length it will be recognized what prodigious blunders disfigure the text, even of those authors who are now thought to be in a pretty good state. Anyone who wishes to form an idea of this from one sample should compare the letters of as they will shortly appear from the Aldine press, with the current copies, and what he will find there he may expect in other authors. A labour indeed worthy of fit for the spirit of a king, to give back to the world something so heavenly, when it was in a state of almost complete collapse; to trace out what lies hid, to dig up what is buried, to call back the dead, to repair what is mutilated, to correct what is corrupted in so many ways, especially by the fault of those common printers who reckon one pitiful gold coin in the way of profit worth more than the whole realm of letters. And another point: however loudly you may sing the praises of those men who by their valour protect or even extend the boundaries of their country, they are active at best in worldly things and constrained within narrow limits. But he who restores a literature in ruins (almost a harder task than to create one) is engaged on a thing sacred and immortal, and works for the benefit not of one province only but of all nations everywhere and of all succeeding ages. Last but not least, this was in old days the privilege of princes, among whom Ptolemy won special glory, although his library was contained within the narrow walls of his own palace. Aldus is building a library which knows no walls save those of the world itself. I cannot believe this modest digression to be without its point. Let it encourage all who wish to learn to give these symbols more serious support and to take more pleasure in them, now that they know from what distinguished precedents they descend, and understand what they mean, and while they bear in mind the blessings which that dolphin promises, if only some deity is at hand to bless these splendid efforts. I will resume29 the thread of my discourse after this diversion; but first I must set out my grievance against certain printers, who do a great disservice to the cause of literature. The complaint itself is not new; but never was it more justified than in these latter days, in which I was preparing the fourth edition, if I am not mistaken, of this work. It was in the year The city of Venice, with its many claims to distinction, has none the less become distinguished through the Aldine press, so much so that any books shipped from Venice to foreign countries immediately find a readier market merely because they bear that city's imprint. And yet the attraction of the name of Venice is so misused by certain sordid printers, that scarcely any city sends us more shamelessly corrupt editions of the standard authors, and those no ordinary names but the very first, Aristotle for instance and Cicero and Quintilian, to say nothing of religious books. It is provided by law that no man should sew a shoe together or make a cupboard, unless he has been approved by his trade guild; yet these eminent authors, to whose works we owe religion itself, are published to the world by men so ill-educated that they cannot so much as read, so idle that they are not prepared to read over what they print, and so mercenary that they would rather see a good book filled with thousands of mistakes than spend a few paltry gold pieces on hiring someone to supervise the proof-correcting. And none make such grand promises on the title- page as those who are most shameless in corrupting everything. The authority of the law gives a right of redress against a man who sells cloth as dyed scarlet, if it is discovered that no berry of the scarlet oat has been added in the dying, and a man can be fined heavily who has practised deception in such goods as these. And is he to enjoy his profits, or rather, the proceeds of his thieving, who at one stroke imposes on so many thousands of his fellow-creatures? In the old days the copying of books by hand was subject to standards no less high than are now demanded of notaries public and sworn attorneys, and they ought certainly to have been higher; nor has there been any more portentous source of textual confusion than the entrusting of so sacred a responsibility haphazard to obscure nobodies and ignorant monks and lately even women. Yet how little is the damage done by a careless or ignorant scribe, if you compare him with a printer! And on this the law of the land has gone to sleep. Punishment waits for the man who sells cloth dyed in England for cloth dyed in Venice, and he is left free to profit from his impertinence who markets mere textual corruptions, intellectual colic, under the label of good authors. You may say, it is not the seller's business to guarantee the buyer against any and every defect. Perhaps: but at least it should be so here, if the title-page promises diligent accuracy and the book is stuffed with blunders. And some are errors which even good scholars cannot at once detect. It is the innumerable crowd of printers that now throws all into confusion, especially in Germany. The first comer is not allowed to set up as a baker; printing is a source of profit from which no mortal being is excluded. You may not draw what you like, or say what you like, without some risk; you may print anything. Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books? Even if, taken out one at a time, they offered something worth knowing, the very mass of them would be a serious impediment to learning from satiety if nothing else, which can do far more damage where good things are concerned, or simply from the fact that men's minds are easily glutted and hungry for something new, and so these distractions call them away from the reading of ancient authors; than whom we have nothing better to show, though I do not deny that the moderns can make some discoveries which have escaped them. A man may exist, for example, who can teach us something that was hidden from Aristotle, but I do not think one will arise who can give us a body of philosophy more complete than what we owe to him. In theology likewise there may perhaps be someone who can see things that were hidden from Chrysostom or Jerome; but I do not think there will be anyone to do for us, taken as a whole, what they did. Now those great men are virtually outdated, and we waste our time on indiscriminate rubbish, while honourable fields of study are neglected with their standard authors, and the authority of legislatures, councils, universities, lawyers, and theologians falls in ruins. If things go on as they have begun, all power will in the end be concentrated in a few hands; we shall see in our midst the same sort of barbarous tyranny that exists among the Turks. Everything will be subject to the whim of one man or of a few; no traces will remain of civilian government, all will be subject to the violence of a military junta. All honourable fields of knowledge will become a desert, and one law alone will be in force, the will of the dictator. As for the princes of the Church, they will be of no account whatever; and if they have any resources left or any influence, they will be held entirely at the good will and pleasure of masters who will control everything as the fancy takes them and not by reason. How much better for mankind if society followed the pattern of nature! - where one element is so balanced against another that all is held together in an eternal concord. Thus every element in the body politic would retain its own legitimate authority: the common people would enjoy their rights, the senate and magistrates would be granted all the privileges that learning, law, and equity would allow them, bishops and priests would still be honoured as they deserve, nor would monks be denied what is their due. This universal harmony in discord, this variety all tending towards one end, would preserve the system of the body politic far more faithfully than happens now, when everyone tries to get his claws into everything. No household can hold together for long unless the husband yields part of his sphere of action to the wife, unless there is some distinction between freemen and slaves, and unless slaves in their turn are treated not as beasts of burden but as human beings; last but not least, unless there is some distinction between one slave and another, such that those who serve in the spirit of free men get more indulgent treatment and as a prize for their service can expect their freedom. At this point someone will say 'Hey, home-made prophet, what has all this to do with printers?' Because no small part of the trouble is introduced by the failure to punish their licence. They fill the world with pamphlets and books - I will not call them worthless, for it may be I write that sort myself but foolish, ignorant, malignant, libellous, mad, impious, and subversive; and such is the flood that even things that might have done some good lose all their goodness. They fly out in swarms, some of them with no author's name or, what is more criminal, with a forged one. When caught out, the printers reply 'Give me something to buy food for my household, and I will cease to print books like this.' You might get the same answer, but with rather more excuse, from any thief, any confidence-trickster, the keeper of any brothel: 'Give me something to live on, and I will abandon my crafty ways.' Or is it perhaps a lesser crime to make secret assaults on another man's purse than openly to deprive him of his reputation? To prostitute your own body or another person's for gain without using violence, than to attack someone else's way of life and the reputation that is dearer than life itself? But enough, and more than enough, of these complaints: I must suggest a remedy. This evil will be much reduced if princes and magistrates will be at pains, so far as they can, to keep out the men without work, whose source, more than anything, is the use of mercenary troops in war. Secondly, if those rascals who are restrained by neither reason nor decency can be shown by the laws, that a big stick awaits them unless they mend their ways. Thirdly, that those who embark on schemes for the public good should be assisted, if their resources fail them, by grants either from princes or from bishops and abbots or from the public treasury. To expect such a public service from business men, most of whom are devoted to Mammon, would perhaps be asking too much. Take those who build an altar or a monument, who hang a picture or set up a statue, and promise themselves a name among posterity: how much more durable the reputation they would secure by the method I suggest! Out of many possibilities I will offer one example. In the interpretation of Holy Scripture scarcely anyone has shown more skill than St John Chrysostom, nor is any author more suitable reading for those who prepare themselves for their duties in the pulpit. And he left a large output, a good part of which we still have, in versions of varying merit, but the majority corrupted, and also mixed with some things that have no Chrysostom about them. Think of the light that would be shed on sacred study, if we had such an important author complete, in Greek, and in a corrected text! - or if we had him at any rate speaking as good Latin as he speaks Greek. I will not put on record here how many ways our magnates have of wasting money, how much is absorbed by gaming, wenching, drinking, needless travel, pageants, wars sought deliberately, ambition, favourites, players, and fools. Of all this at least that is spent to their shame let them divert some portion either for the public benefit or for their own glory or for both. When Aldus was attempting such things, was there a scholar who did not support him? Who did not make some contribution to help a man overburdened by so great a task? How often were ancient copies sent him unsought from Hungary and Poland, and complimentary presents with them, that with all needful diligence he might publish them worldwide! And what Aldus was attempting in Italy - for he himself has breathed his last, although the press still enjoys the good- will of his honoured name - that Johann Froben attempts across the Alps, with no less zeal than Aldus and not wholly without success but, it cannot be denied, with less than equal profit. If you ask why, of many possible reasons I think this is the one, that in our country men's minds are not so open as they are in Italy, at least in the literary field. For I am not afraid to speak from my own experience. When I, a Dutchman, was in Italy, preparing to publish my book of Proverbs, all the learned men there had offered me unsought authors not yet published in print who they thought might be of use to me and Aldus had nothing in his treasurehouse that he did not share with me. Johannes Lascaris did the same, so did Battista Egnazio, Marco Musuro, Frate felt the benefit of kindness from some people I knew neither by sight nor name. I was bringing nothing to Venice with me except the confused and unsorted materials for a book that was to be, and that material was confined to published authors. With the greatest temerity on my part, we both set to work together, I to write and Aldus to print. The whole business was finished inside nine months more or less, and all the time I was coping with an attack of the stone, a trouble in which as yet I had no experience. Just consider what advantages I should have lost, had not scholars supplied me with texts in manuscript. Among them were Plato's works in Greek, Plutarch's Lives and also his Moralia which began to be printed when my work was nearly finished, the Doctors at Dinner of Athenaeus, Aphthonius, Hermogenes with notes, Aristotle's Rhetoric with the scholia of Gregory of Nazianzus, the whole of Aristides with scholia, brief commentaries on Hesiod and Theocritus, Eustathius on the whole of Homer, Pausanias, Pindar with accurate commentary, a collection of proverbs under Plutarch's name and another ascribed to Apostolius to which I was given access by Girolamo There were other small things too whose names escape me or are not worth recording. Not one of these had yet been printed. And now in turn let me describe the generous behaviour of a friend of mine from across the Alps; one of my special friends I thought him, and still do, for one should 'know one's friends' weaknesses but hate them When I was preparing the Venice edition, I happened to have seen in his possession a Suidas which had the proverbs marked in the margins. It was an immense work, and meant a great deal of reading. Hoping therefore to spare myself trouble, I asked him to lend me the volume, even if only for a few hours, while my servant transcribed the notes into my copy. I asked him repeatedly, and he always said no. After bringing every form of pressure to bear on him without success, I asked him whether he had a mind to publish the proverbs himself, for if so I would most gladly get out of the way of a man who would do the job much better than myself. He swore he had no such intention. Then what' I asked him 'are your motives?' And at last, like a man who confesses under torture, he said that everything is now becoming public property from which scholars hitherto had been able to secure the admiration of the common people. 'Hence all those There lie hid in the colleges and monasteries of Germany, France, and England very ancient manuscripts which their owners are so far from making available of their own accord (with few exceptions) than when asked to do so, they either conceal them or deny their existence or charge an exhorbitant fee for the use of manuscripts which they value at ten times their true worth. In the end these books, so beautifully looked after, are either destroyed by damp and worms or are removed by thieves. And our grandees are so far from helping the cause of good literature by their generosity that they think no money so irretrievably wasted as what is spent on such good purposes; nor do they approve of anything at all from which they get no pecuniary return. If only the princes on our side of the Alps encouraged liberal studies in the open-handed way one finds in Italy, the Froben serpents35 would not be much worse off than the Aldine dolphin. Aldus, making haste slowly, has acquired as much gold as he has reputation, and richly deserves both. Froben holds his staff always upright with no purpose in view except the public good, he never swerves from the innocency of his doves, and expresses the wisdom of serpents more in his badge than his behaviour; and so he is richer in reputation than in coin. But it is time to put a stop to these digressions. I must now return3 to the exposition of the adage. It will be possible to use the proverb in three ways. The first is when we wish to point out that one should give prolonged thought to a piece of business before starting on it, but when one's mind is made up one should finish it with speed, so that the anchor symbolizes delay in considering and the dolphin speed in finishing. That remark in Sallust comes in here: 'You should take counsel before you start; and when you have thought, then act quickly and have done.' The same opinion is reviewed by Aristotle in book 6 of the Ethics as one widely held: They say' he remarks 'that what you have thought about should be despatched quickly, but you should take time to consider things.' For this Laertius tells us that Bias is the authority, for he used habitually to advise a slow start in any business, but steady perseverance once it is begun. There is a moral maxim due, I suspect, to which is not far from this: 'Prepare for war at leisure, that you may more quickly win,' as well as that other one: 'Weigh well what's right; there's safety in delay.' To which one can add the proverb41 'Night is the mother of counsel.' And that phrase of Sophocles in the Oedipus Tyrannus: 'Quick thinkers are not safe.' With these one should put a saying of Plato's which I have quoted 'He who is in too much of a hurry to start is slow to arrive.' Rather different, but to be classified under the same head, is Quintilian's view that children of precocious gifts do not easily come to much good; also the current saying that those who are wise in childhood, and as it were before their time, make foolish old men. This is, I think, confirmed by Accius, who is reported by Gellius as saying that the minds of the young are like unripe fruit. He thought a certain tartness acceptable in both, because it showed the only ones that would ripen. They will be sweet all in good time when they are ripe; while all the rest go off before ripening. There will be another way of using this, when we wish to point out that the emotions must be reined in, as it were, by the reason. having divided the soul of man into three parts, reason, impulse, and desire, thinks philosophy can be summed up in this, that the emotions should obey the reason as their king, and considers that for this very purpose the seat of the reason is located in a kind of citadel in the brain. The Peripatetics, with Aristotle as their standard-bearer, consider that nature has endowed us with emotions, which are a kind of moving force in the mind, to be a kind of stimulus to rouse us to the practice of virtue; although this is rejected by the Stoics, and in particular by Seneca in the books On Anger which he addressed to Nero. Their view is that emotions of this kind make no contribution to virtue, and in fact are an obstacle; though they do not deny, any more than anyone else,' that in the heart of their theoretical wise man there remain original impulses which normally forestall the reason and which you would find it impossible to root out altogether. But to prevent their proving acceptable, they are promptly rejected by the reason. This is what Homer alludes to when, in the first Iliad, Pallas stands behind Achilles and restrains him when he puts his hand to the hilt of his sword. And so you would be right to call those powerful impulses the dolphin, and the anchor the wisdom that controls them. Seneca has said nothing is the better for delay, except anger, but whenever our desires or dislikes are immoderate, there delay is a good thing. Plutarch in his 'Sayings of Romans' tells how the philosopher Athenodorus, having obtained leave from Octavius Augustus to retire to his own home on grounds of age, recommended to him that when angry he should never do or say anything until he had repeated to himself the names of the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet. Whereupon the emperor replied that he still needed Athenodorus, to teach him the art of silence as well as speech, and on this pretext he retained him for a whole further year. There is a line in Terence to the same effect: 'Be careful; this may be a little too hot.' Some people by nature need the spur, and some the bridle; and so those men in ancient times were quite right who liked to see a dolphin twisted round an anchor, because the two things should be balanced one against the other and always coexist, so as to produce a permanent habit of mind like that which Plato thinks can be engendered by the equal practice of 'music' and 'gymnastic.' A third method of use will be when we wish to point out that in all business one should avoid the headlong haste which in some people is by nature a besetting fault and in everything makes them think a delay however short is too long. This kind of hurry is usually accompanied by error and repentance, as in that well-known Greek line53 'Haste is for many men a cause of trouble.' One must keep on dinning into such people that famous remark of Cato 'Soon enough if well enough/ which is recorded by St Jerome, when he writes to Pammachius in these words: That's a good remark of Cato's too: "Soon enough, if well enough," which made us laugh when we were young and heard it said by a finished orator in some brief preface. I expect you remember how we both went wrong, when the whole lecture-hall rang to the students' shouts of "Soon enough, if well enough."' Those were Jerome's words. It will be suitable also for those who pursue a reputation in a hurry, and would rather have a great name easily come by than one which is solid and will last. What blooms too early quickly withers; what grows slowly will endure. 'Marcellus' glory grows as grows the oak, / By secret lapse of time/ and Pindar in the eighth of his Nemean Hymns: 'But valour grows as grows the tree, fed with fresh dews, rising among wise men and just towards the limpid sky.' All those, in a word, who go astray either from idleness or from undue haste should call to mind Octavius Caesar's motto 'Make haste slowly' and that famous emblem, once Vespasian's, that now belongs to Aldus: let them remember the dolphin and the anchor. 1 Knights observes that Erasmus claims 2 Iliad not to know the source, though 3 Works and Days he quotes the play often in the 4 Iliad Adages) 5 Sardanapalus was a king of The dolphin and anchor coin was Assyria. first issued by the Emperor Titus 6 The dictator whose delaying tactics in AD Pietro Bembo held back Hannibal who gave the coin to the 7 Ennius Annals (Vahlen) Venetian printer Aldo Manuzio, 8 Attic Nights was a humanist scholar who later 9 Saturnalia became cardinal. Aeneid Saturnalia 'Augustus' in Lives of the Servius' commentary on Aeneid Caesars (the Greek word means Euripides Phoenissae (Mynors 'turning back on itself) Georgics Girolamo Aleandro Horapollo Hieroglyphics (a book a scholar, later a cardinal; despite purporting to explain the Egyp- the early friendship he became tian writing) was published by an enemy to Erasmus. Aldus in Publilius Syrus A the basis of Moralia adage II v x The friend who owned the Physics marked-up copy of this important Halieutica collection of proverbs is not Natural History known. The echeneis or remora is a See i iii mythical creature, a kind of Froben's printer's mark was a suckerfish that when attached caduceus, a rod entwined with to the hull could slow down a two serpents, on the tip of which ship; it is described in Pliny perched a dove. (also D'Arcy W. Thompson, A See note Glossary of Greek Fishes [Oxford Cataline Adages n iii Nicomachean Ethics Virgil Aeneid Diogenes Laertius Virgil Georgics Publilius Syrus D 3, D 6 The edition appeared in the ii ii same year as the Adages printed Oedipus the King by Aldus, and was based on a in v from Republic sixth-century manuscript. Institutes of Oratory Cf in i i* Attic Nights The first Ptolemy (fourth century Republic BC) founded in Egypt what On Anger and became known as the Library Iliad of Alexandria. On Anger The next five paragraphs were Moralia added in the edition of the Eunuch edition Erasmus mistakenly calls In many places in Plato, eg the 'fourth' is actually the sixth. Republic Janus Lascaris Gi- Menander Sententiae ambattista Egnazio Dicta memorabilia Jordan, Marcus Musurus quoted in the Letters of Jerome and Urbano Valeriani (c were all scholars who Odes taught in Venice. Nemean Odes
Erasmus's commentary on Varro's saying man is a bubble - short, dense, and a clear forerunner of the Renaissance vanitas tradition. A reminder of how a one-line proverb could open into a meditation on the brevity of life.
Erasmus found this common proverb in Varro, and first used it in Col- lectanea (no The topos was well known to the Romans (Otto and is found in many European langages (Tosi including English (Tilley M where it was very popular with writers of the Renaissance (eg, Francis Bacon's variation 'The world's a bubble, and the life of man / Less than a span'). The essay concludes with a brief but thematically appropriate pane- gyric on the death of Philip, archduke of Austria, son of the Emperor Maximilian.
The bubble that rises on the surface of water and bursts at once. Varro and the Ad Herennium are Erasmus's chief authorities; he extends them with his own.
Man is but a bubble. The lesson of this proverb is that there is nothing so fragile, so fleeting and so empty as the life of man. A bubble is that round swollen empty thing which we watch in water as it grows and vanishes in a moment of time. Thus Marcus Terentius Varro in the preface to his book on agriculture: 'Bearing in mind' he says 'that I must make haste; for if, as they say, man is but a bubble, much more is this true of an old man. My eightieth year reminds me to pack my baggage, before I bid farewell to life.' Lucian too in his Charon makes men's lives something very like this kind of bubble: some vanish at once as soon as they are born, some last a little longer, but all of them at very brief intervals take the place of others. Nor could one think of anything, in fact, which would give a better picture of the utter nothingness of this life of ours. Consider first what risks we run when we see the light of day. How destitute, how much exposed to great perils is our infancy! How fleeting is our adolescence! How our prime hastens by! Aristotle in the Politics and again in book 3 of the Rhetoric states that a man's bodily powers begin to fade about his thirty-fifth year and his mental powers about his forty-ninth. Hippocrates brings the peak of a man's life to an end at forty-nine; and if you deduct childhood and old age from the sum of life, just think how little will be left, and that little beset with such great emergencies. Unnumbered kinds of sickness threaten us every day, and no fewer are the mishaps to which we are exposed, collapsing houses, poison, shipwreck, war, earthquakes, landslides, lightning, anything. One man is suffocated by swallowing a grape-pip, another strangled by drinking a hair in a cup of milk. There are cases of men meeting sudden death, when an icicle hardened by frost has fallen from a roof. And this is the same creature that sets such commotions afoot, and for whose appetites this world is too I cannot refrain from transcribing at this point a passage from book 7 of where he skilfully depicts the frailty and shortness of our life. 'Fragile truly and uncertain is this gift, such as it is, that nature gives us; brief and niggardly is our portion, even for those who get the most generous share, at any rate if we consider the whole span of time. In fact, if we take account of the nights spent in slumber, each man is alive for no more than half of his allotted term, and an equal portion is spent in a state like death, or is punishment if one cannot sleep. Nor does this take account of the years of infancy, which have no sense, nor of old age when long life is a punishment; all the dangers of many kinds, the sickness, fears, anxieties, the appeals to death, so frequent that it is the most common object of prayer. Nature indeed has given men nothing more precious than shortness of life. The senses fail, the limbs are tormented, our sight hearing and walking before we fail ourselves, and so do our teeth and the organs by which we feed. Yet all this time is counted as a part of life.' The comparison with bubbles finds a parallel in Homer's famous image of the leaves falling from the tree. These are the words of Glaucus in Homer, in the sixth Iliad: Like leaves upon the tree, the life of man: One race of leaves the wind strews on the ground And another the wood puts forth at the call of spring. These lines, so Diogenes Laertius tells us, were a particular favourite with Pyrrho the Academic philosopher. Homer again, in Iliad Like leaves, they now are green and flourishing, Eating earth's plenty, and now they fall and die. And in another passage, I forget where: 'For earth breeds nothing less robust than man.' cited by Plutarch in his 'Consolation Addressed to Apollonius': Hear the whole tale in brief: you are a man. No creature climbs so quickly to the heights, Changes, and sinks again into the depths And rightly so for, weakest as he is Of living things, he takes great tasks in hand. cited in the same author: 'Happiness is not steadfast; it lasts but for a day. One day tears down what yesterday exalted, and raises the low on high.' In that same passage Demetrius of Phalerum" is said to have criticized the poet, otherwise renowned for the elegance of his style, on the ground that instead of 'one day' he ought to have written 'a point of time.' Pindar outdid even the image used by Homer, for he called man- kind not 'leaves' but 'a shadow in a dream.' The passage will be found in the eighth hymn of the Pythians: 'Creatures of a day, what is anyone? What no one? Man is a shadow in a dream/ Nothing is as empty as a shadow, for it appears to be something, and is nothing; but he has found what is emptier even than that, a shadow in a dream. As a result, no one can say This man is somebody/ or its opposite, "This man is nobody'; for so sudden are the changes in human affairs that the man who seems to be something the next moment is nobody, and he who seemed to have perished is in a moment somebody. in a fragment preserved by Stobaeus, makes man's life like the shadow of smoke: 'The seed of man thinks thoughts that last a day, / No more to be trusted than the shadow of smoke/ Sophocles too in the Ajax: 'Man is but wind and shadow, nothing more/ Pindar in the eleventh hymn of the Nemeans: 'If a man is rich, and in bodily grace surpasses others, and if by victory in the games he has shown heroic strength, let him remember that the limbs he bears round with him are mortal, and that he must be clad in earth, the end to which all men come/ This truth might properly be written up in the courts of princes, on their drinking-cups and in their tapestries and their banners, rather than such boastful words as 'He can that will' and 'Further yet' and other things of the kind. But nothing can be more exquisite than the well-known comparison between roses, which open so quickly and so quickly grow old and die, and the life of man. A poem survives under Virgil's name16 which, though it does not particularly recall Virgil's style of writing, is yet so full of elegance and charm that it clearly stems from some author who was not only a polished scholar but, whoever he was, a very gifted man. Here too belongs that myth beloved of poets, which depicts all mortals as suspended from threads spun by the Fates, and when those threads are cut, down they fall forthwith. Some too hang from white threads and some from threads of a mornful hue, some hang high in air and some near the ground, but all have the same lot: the moment Atropos, who hears no man's prayer, snaps a thread with her thumb, down falls the man who hung from it, nor is any distinction made except that the man who hung higher makes more disturbance when he falls. You may smile, and think is a mere fable, a game that poets play. A game it may be, but pitiless and cruel is the game played by the Fates. And if they would but confine it to ordinary ineffectual men who are covered by Homer's phrase17 'a useless burden on the earth/ and would not take from us before their time men gifted by heaven and the very best of our princes! It is not merely that they do not refrain from playing their unprincipled game even with such as these; they seem to lie in wait for them of set purpose as though they were jealous of their power and meant to leave no doubt that this is within its range, and to make it clear that every mortal, whoever he may be, is equally nothing but a bubble. What a loss the world of letters lately suffered, when early death snatched from us Paolo patrician of Venice, a young man scarcely yet twenty-five years old but, in heaven's name, so gifted, so prolific, with such keen judgment, such ready utterance, such knowl- edge of every language and of every subject! Inexorable Fate thought it not her business if she inflicted such a loss on humane studies, to which he had already begun to contribute so effectively, or if she left such a sense of bereavement in the devotees of good literature by suddenly cutting off that great harvest and the high hopes of scholars everywhere. And now there is the unexpected death of my Prince Philip of which I cannot speak, so bitter is my sorrow for his loss, yet it is not right for me, prompted by such a context, to say nothing of one who showed me such outstanding generosity. Of all the princes upon whom the Sun ever shone he was unique, the best, the greatest, the most gifted. Fortune gave the world a glimpse of him, and, alas, it was only a glimpse and she snatched him away. Whether natural endowments or the splendours of exalted rank, what can heaven give to mortals which was not his in highest excellence and greatest plenty? Physically of heroic stature, how noble, and yet how winning, was his air, and how bright his eye! His was a happy disposition, vigorous health and strength, a noble stance and bearing. Of his distinguished ancestry why need I speak? Kings, emperors, famous captains are to be found in it in such plenty, that nothing could be imagined so grand, so illustrious and so noble. With these there went some secret heaven-sent power, which acted like a magnet, and won him instantly the affection of kings and peoples, of his own nation and of foreigners and, in a word, of all mankind, so that not merely to see him or to talk with him, but even the sound of Philip's name, somehow aroused exceptional goodwill. And could the greatest prince hope for a happier gift than that? This charm, which was part of his destiny, was enhanced by his singular courtesy and flexibility of manner, such that all kings and all nations were remarkably unanimous in their affection for him, and even those who were at war not long before, were equally zealous, once they had laid down their arms, in doing honour to Prince Philip. Such were the universal peace and concord, the gratitude and joy, wherever he had sown the light of his countenance. Well might the generals of antiquity and classical triumphs seem of no account to anyone which all those kings, princes and nations - France, Savoy, Spain, Germany, England - competed with one another in contributing to those two expeditions into Spain. Anyone who had contributed anything to Philip's glory felt that he had much enhanced his own. On all this my Panegyricus is there to testify. Then there is the wife20 who has borne him a family, his children all alive and well, his father (to put limitless glory in a single word) Maximilian. There are all those kings closely bound as well by ties of kinship; the greatness of the empire in which he was born and the wealth of the kingdom to which he was summoned, the succession to his father's majesty, and all the great hopes inspired by the gifts, the destiny and the character that were his - hopes that were sure and certain, had heaven been willing to allow any certainty in mortal affairs. The success he had already enjoyed was very great, and all the greater because it did not come, as it does to most men, through violence and bloodshed and the sufferings of others; for there is scarcely any other way to acquire supreme power. Among all the elements of our Philip's achievements, not one was stained with blood, not one brought with it misery or loss for anyone else. And what the future held was offered on such terms that he would not seem to be grasping it for himself; he would be in no position to refuse it. These were the gifts, these the distinctions, the international popularity, the goodwill of so many monarchs, the just and affectionate prayers of a devoted father, the enthusiasm of his own countrymen and their unbounded hopes, the whole world's expectations - all this, as I say, was suddenly cut short by his untimely death. It was a needlessly cruel demonstration of the truth that no mortal man, however close he may come to the heavenly powers, is other than a bubble. But it is more than time for me to leave this topic and return to the subject on which I am engaged, for I would not give anyone cause to complain that I have abandoned my adages in mid-career and turned to declamation; though I see that Pliny frequently digresses on similar topics to please himself. It was grief drove me somewhat off course, and not the charm of the subject-matter. 1 Varro, De re rustica Sophocles frag Nauck, from 2 Lucian Charon the lost Ajax Locrensis, in Stobaeus 3 Aristotle Politics and following) and Rhetoric Nemeans The Carmen de rosis, a 4 Juvenal commonly poem in the Appendix Vergiliana, attributed to Alexander the Great also ascribed to the late classical 5 Pliny Natural History poet Ausonius 6 Homer Iliad Iliad 7 Diogenes Laertius Paolo Canal died shortly before 8 Homer Iliad and Odyssey these words appeared in the edition of 9 Menander frag cited in Philip, archduke of Austria Plutarch Moralia son of Emperor Euripides Phoenissae with a Maximilian and Mary of Bur- fragment from his Ion (frag gundy Nauck) in Plutarch Moralia Joanna the Mad, heiress to the An Athenian orator of the late Spanish throne; she and Philip fourth century BC were the parents of Charles v Pythians Pliny the younger occasionally Aeschylus frag Nauck, in writes about the recently dead in Stobaeus his Letters.
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.