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^[1]^:102 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.^[2]

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^{[citation needed]}, 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)

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.^[3]

References

↑ Baratta, Luca (1 September 2022). "‘A Scorneful Image of this Present World’: Translating and Mistranslating Erasmus’s Words in Henrician England". Critical Survey 34 (3): 100–122. doi:10.3167/cs.2022.340307.
↑ Schaff, Philip (1858–1890). History of the Christian Church, Volume VII. Modern Christianity. The German Reformation - Christian Classics Ethereal Library. https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc7/hcc7.ii.iv.xii.html?queryID=26857203&resultID=162373.
↑ "Why Catholic Philosophy?" (in en-us). https://www.stbernards.edu/blog/why-catholic-philosophy.

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.

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[1] Baratta, Luca (1 September 2022). "‘A Scorneful Image of this Present World’: Translating and Mistranslating Erasmus’s Words in Henrician England". Critical Survey 34 (3): 100–122. doi:10.3167/cs.2022.340307.

[2] Schaff, Philip (1858–1890). History of the Christian Church, Volume VII. Modern Christianity. The German Reformation - Christian Classics Ethereal Library. https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc7/hcc7.ii.iv.xii.html?queryID=26857203&resultID=162373.

[3] "Why Catholic Philosophy?" (in en-us). https://www.stbernards.edu/blog/why-catholic-philosophy.

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