Philosophy:Adagia

Short description: Collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled by Erasmus of Rotterdam

Title page of the 1508 edition, printed by Aldus Manutius, Venice

Portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1523

Adagia (singular adagium) is the title of an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus' repository of proverbs is "one of the most monumental ... ever assembled" (Speroni, 1964, p. 1).

The first edition, titled Collectanea Adagiorum, was published in Paris in 1500, in a slim quarto of around eight hundred entries. By 1508, after his stay in Italy, Erasmus had expanded the collection (now called Adagiorum chiliades tres or "Three thousands of proverbs") to over 3,000 items, many accompanied by richly annotated commentaries, some of which were brief essays on political and moral topics. The work continued to expand right up to the author's death in 1536 (to a final total of 4,151 entries), confirming the fruit of Erasmus' vast reading in ancient literature.

Commonplace examples from Adagia

Some of the adages have become commonplace in many European languages. Equivalents in English include:

More haste, less speed The blind leading the blind A rolling stone gathers no moss One man's meat is another man's poison Necessity is the mother of invention One step at a time To be in the same boat To lead one by the nose A rare bird Even a child can see it To have one foot in Charon's boat (To have one foot in the grave) To walk on tiptoe One to one Out of tune A point in time I gave as bad as I got (I gave as good as I got) To call a spade a spade Hatched from the same egg Up to both ears (Up to his eyeballs) As though in a mirror Think before you start What's done cannot be undone Many parasangs ahead (Miles ahead) We cannot all do everything Many hands make light work A living corpse Where there's life, there's hope To cut to the quick Time reveals all things Golden handcuffs Crocodile tears To lift a finger You have touched the issue with a needle-point (To have nailed it) To walk the tightrope Time tempers grief (Time heals all wounds) With a fair wind To dangle the bait Kill two birds with one stone

To swallow the hook The bowels of the earth Happy in one's own skin Hanging by a thread The dog is worthy of his dinner To weigh anchor To grind one's teeth Nowhere near the mark To throw cold water on Complete the circle In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king No sooner said than done Neither with bad things nor without them (Women: can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em) Between a stone and a shrine (Between a rock and a hard place) Like teaching an old man a new language (Can't teach an old dog new tricks) A necessary evil There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip To squeeze water out of a stone To leave no stone unturned Let the cobbler stick to his last (Stick to your knitting) God helps those who help themselves The grass is greener over the fence The cart before the horse Dog in the manger One swallow doesn't make a summer His heart was in his boots To sleep on it To break the ice Ship-shape To die of laughing To have an iron in the fire To look a gift horse in the mouth Neither fish nor flesh Like father, like son Not worth a snap of the fingers He blows his own trumpet To show one's heels A snail's pace A dung beetle hunting an eagle Prevention is better than cure

70 of the Adages were from Aesop's fables.

Context

Adagia title page 1537 edition (V. Ravani e soci, Venice), author's name struck out by Jesuits. Biblioteca di Brera

Adagia 1537 edition page 296, Sileni Alcibiadis, heavily censored by Jesuits

The work reflects a typical Renaissance attitude toward classical texts: to wit, that they were fit for appropriation and amplification, as expressions of a timeless wisdom first uncovered by the classical authors. It is also an expression of the contemporary humanism; the Adagia could only have happened via the developing intellectual environment in which careful attention to a broader range of classical texts produced a much fuller picture of the literature of antiquity than had been possible, or desired, in medieval Europe. In a period in which sententiæ were often marked by special fonts and footnotes in printed texts, and in which the ability to use classical wisdom to bolster modern arguments was a critical part of scholarly and even political discourse, it is not surprising that Erasmus' Adagia was among the most popular volumes of the century.

Erasmus originally intended to include Biblical adages, parables and imagery, however this was too ambitious; he later addressed these with his New Testament Annotations and Paraphrases.

Source: Erasmus, Desiderius. Adages in Collected Works of Erasmus. Trans. R.A.B Mynors et al. Volumes 31–36. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982–2006. (A complete annotated translation into English. There is a one-volume selection: Erasmus, Desiderius. Adages. Ed. William Barker. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.)

Sileni Alcibiadis (The Sileni of Alcibiadis)

Further information: Erasmus § Sileni Alcibiadis (1515)

An unprepossessing exterior may hide a beautiful interior (and vice versa.) The incarnation of Christ is the highest example.

Bidden or unbidden, God is always there

Erasmus traces this back through the Romans (Latin: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit) to a Spartan saying. Carl Jung reputedly had this enscribed on his study door.

Further reading

• Eden, Kathy. Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property and the 'Adages' of Erasmus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
• Greene, Thomas. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.
• Hunter, G.K. "The Marking of Sententiæ in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances." The Library 5th series 6 (1951): 171–188.
• McConica, James K. Past Masters: Erasmus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Phillips, Margaret Mann. The Adages of Erasmus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.
• Saladin, Jean-Christophe, ed (2011) (in fr). Érasme de Rotterdam: Les Adages. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. ISBN 978-2-251-34605-2. 
• Speroni, Charles. (1964). Wit and wisdom of the Italian Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.

External links

• Erasmi Roterodami Adagiorum Chiliades Tres. Venice, 1508 Digital Edition
• Erasmi Roterodami Germaniae decoris Adagiorum chiliades tres. Basel, 1513 Digital Edition
• Adagia, complete Latin text online Base text used for the 2011 Belles Lettres translation in French.
• Adagia, complete Latin text online Searchable text from the nine-part volume II of the ASD Opera omnia, with full annotations and commentary. The actual volumes are available as scans from Open Access.
• Adagia, complete Latin text Scan of volume II of the Leiden Opera omnia of 1703-6.
• List of the proverbs From the 1703 Leiden Opera omnia, Leiden University.
• Proverbs taken chiefly from the Adagia (1814) explained and freely downloadable through the Internet Archive.
• Suringar, W. H. D., Erasmus over nederlandsche spreekworden (Utrecht 1873): An extraordinary and formerly hard-to-find compilation that identifies Erasmus' proverbs in many 16th-century vernacular proverb collections.