Adages

A dictionary of ancient sayings that Erasmus kept enlarging until its entries had become essays on kings, war and printing.

by Desiderius Erasmus5,791 passages held

Latin, the original language

Original title: Adagia
First published: 1500(aged 34)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

In 1575 the Giunti press in Florence printed an edition of the Adages that the Council of Trent had commissioned and Pope Gregory XIII had licensed. It had been purged of anything that might offend a pious reader and stripped of its author's name. Erasmus had begun the book in Paris in 1500 as a slim collection of about eight hundred Greek and Latin sayings, each with a short note, and dedicated it to his former pupil Lord Mountjoy, the English nobleman who was his patron. His claim was that a proverb is ancient wisdom in its smallest portable form: a reader who learns where a saying came from and what it first meant has recovered a piece of the classical world and can use it in his own Latin. He went on adding to it for the rest of his life. The edition that Aldus Manutius printed in Venice in 1508 held more than three thousand entries, and edition by edition some of the notes grew into essays. A saying about a beetle hunting an eagle becomes an attack on predatory kings. The motto of Aldus's press, Festina lente (make haste slowly), becomes an account of scholarly printing and of the Italian scholars who helped Erasmus with the book. The long essay on war, added for the Basel edition of 1515, was soon printed separately and has its own page here. The last edition, published in Basel in 1536, the year Erasmus died, counts 4,151 adages. In 1559 the papal Index of Prohibited Books banned all of his works; the revised Index of 1564 allowed some of them to circulate once expurgated, and the Adages of 1575 was the result.

Key concepts

What counts as an adage in Erasmus's Adages?

An adage is a well-known saying made memorable by some shrewd and novel turn. Erasmus builds the definition from three parts: it must be a saying, it must be in common use, and it must have a twist that makes it stick. 'Friends hold all things in common' qualifies because everyone quoted it and because it packs a whole view of friendship as equality into four words.

Why did Erasmus think proverbs belong to philosophy?

Because, as he reports Aristotle's view, proverbs are the remains of an ancient philosophy destroyed in the great disasters of human history. They survived where whole books perished because they were short and pleasant to repeat. Studying one is therefore a kind of salvage: trace the saying back to its first author and you recover a fragment of what the ancients thought, not merely a figure of speech.

What does “make haste slowly” mean in the Adages?

It joins speed and caution in one rule: act promptly, but with judgement. Erasmus traces it to a saying of the Emperor Augustus and to an old coin showing an anchor with a dolphin wound round it, the dolphin for swiftness, the anchor for steadiness. The same emblem was the printer's mark of Aldus Manutius in Venice, and Erasmus turns the note into praise of patient, careful scholarly printing.

What are the Sileni of Alcibiades?

They were small carved figures that looked grotesque when closed, like a comic flute-player, but opened to reveal a god inside. Alcibiades compared Socrates to them, ugly outside and wise within. Erasmus makes the image a test of value: what looks contemptible may be divine, and what looks splendid, such as a rich and powerful churchman, may be empty when opened.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Ancient Wisdom in Small Change

Can a few worn words still carry a lost philosophy? The Adages wagers that every saying traced back to its first author returns a piece of the ancient world to the reader.

Erasmus defines a proverb as a well-known saying made striking by some shrewd turn, and quotes Aristotle's view that proverbs are the remains of an ancient philosophy wrecked by history, kept alive because they were short and witty. So each entry works backwards: where the saying first appears, what it meant there, how a writer may use it now. The collection opens with Pythagoras's 'friends hold all things in common', and its notes grow into praise of Aldus's press and complaint about the labour of the book itself.

proverbs
language
classical literature
interpretation
metaphor
education
friendship

Enter a dialogue

Sayings Turned Against the Powerful

What happens to a schoolbook of proverbs when its author lets the notes speak about rulers and rich churchmen? Some entries become essays that a censor later had to cut.

Old sayings gave Erasmus a safe-looking place to say dangerous things. The eagle that a beetle pursues becomes the image of kings who live by plunder, though he adds that he speaks of most, not all. 'One must be born a king or a fool' exposes a system that hands power to anyone born to it, sane or mad. And the Sileni, ugly statuettes that open to show a god, turn into a measure of Christ against the splendour of popes and priests.

justice
wealth
deception
satire
irony
religion
fortune

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 5,791
distinct concepts: 2,671
by passages held, corpus-wide: #3

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “language” and “proverbs”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 86 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
language	proverbs	155
proverbs	rhetoric	139
language	rhetoric	106
language	metaphor	70
deception	proverbs	43
metaphor	proverbs	38
metaphor	rhetoric	36
education	proverbs	34
proverbs	prudence	29
education	virtue	28
education	rhetoric	27
deception	rhetoric	23
deception	language	17
deception	prudence	15
proverbs	virtue	13
rhetoric	virtue	12
education	language	8
education	metaphor	6
deception	metaphor	5
education	prudence	5
language	virtue	5
language	prudence	3
metaphor	virtue	3
prudence	rhetoric	3
prudence	virtue	3
deception	education	2
deception	virtue	1
metaphor	prudence	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1500 Adages (Adagia) you are here LA
1503 The Manual of the Christian Knight (Enchiridion militis Christiani)
The earnest twin of In Praise of Folly: when critics attacked the satire, Erasmus answered that it treats the same subject as this manual, only in a playful spirit.
EN
1504 Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria (Panegyricus ad Philippum Austriae ducem)
Erasmus's advice to a ruler, delivered as a speech of welcome; The Complaint of Peace and the essay on war later make its case for peace without the obligatory flattery.
LA
1511 In Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium)
A mock oration in Folly's own voice and Erasmus's most famous book; The Tongue of 1525 has been read as an attempt at a companion piece.
LAEN
1511 On the Method of Study (De ratione studii)
Part of the same English years' work as De copia, with which it was later printed; Erasmus's later The Education of Children moves the same programme back to infancy.
LA
1515 Erasmus Against War (Dulce bellum inexpertis)
The fullest essay on war in the Adages and the core of Erasmus's writings for peace; The Complaint of Peace restates its case two years later in Peace's own voice.
EN
1516 The Education of a Christian Prince (Institutio principis christiani)
Erasmus's one full treatise on government, in the old genre of advice books for rulers; The Complaint of Peace followed a year later.
LA
1517 The Complaint of Peace (Querela pacis)
A declamation in the voice of Peace, the device of In Praise of Folly turned to a serious purpose, and the most direct of Erasmus's several writings against war.
LAEN
1518 Familiar Colloquies (Colloquia familiaria)
The book that carried Erasmus's views on fasting, pilgrimage and monks to far more readers than his devotional treatises ever reached.
LAEN
1518 In Praise of Marriage (De laude matrimonii)
A schoolroom piece that turned into a controversy: the first of three works on marriage, followed by The Institution of Christian Matrimony in 1526 and On the Christian Widow in 1529.
LA
1520 The Antibarbarians (Antibarbari)
The first statement of the cause Erasmus served all his life, classical learning as the ally of Christian faith, written before any of the books that made his name.
LA
1521 On Disdaining the World (De contemptu mundi)
The counterweight to everything Erasmus later wrote about monks, from The Manual of the Christian Knight to the Familiar Colloquies, and probably the earliest of his surviving prose works.
LA
1524 On Praying to God (Modus orandi Deum)
Pastoral rather than polemical, though written in the same year as On Free Will, his challenge to Luther; the first of the late handbooks on Christian practice that end with An Explanation of the Apostles' Creed.
LA
1525 The Tongue (Lingua)
Erasmus's fullest treatment of a theme that runs through all his writing, speech as the mirror of the soul, written in Basel in the middle of the polemics of the 1520s.
LA
1526 The Institution of Christian Matrimony (Christiani matrimonii institutio)
Commissioned through the English court and dedicated to its queen, it is Erasmus's main statement on the law and practice of marriage, where In Praise of Marriage had been a single persuasive letter.
LA
1528 The Ciceronian (Dialogus cui titulus Ciceronianus)
Satire aimed at fellow humanists rather than at theologians, unusual in Erasmus's later years; it first appeared in one volume with his dialogue on the pronunciation of Latin and Greek.
LA
1529 On the Christian Widow (Vidua christiana)
The last of Erasmus's writings on women's lives, after In Praise of Marriage and The Institution of Christian Matrimony, and like the second of those dedicated to a queen.
LA
1529 The Education of Children (De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis)
Dedicated to a prince's heir, like The Education of a Christian Prince, but concerned with every child's first years rather than with government; the most personal of Erasmus's books on schooling.
LAEN
1533 An Explanation of the Apostles' Creed (Explanatio symboli)
Erasmus's catechism, written for lay readers rather than theologians three years before his death.
LA

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