Adagia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Adagia (adagium is the singular form and adagia is the plural) is an annotated collection of Greek and Latin adages, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. According to Speroni (1964, p. 1), Adagia is one of "the most monumental collections of [...] adagia ever assembled".

The collection is the fruit of Erasmus' vast reading in Classical literature; he expanded it occasionally throughout his career, and the book did not attain its final form until close to his death.

The first edition, titled Collecteana Adagiorum was published in Paris in 1500, in a slim quarto of around eight hundred proverbs. By the end of his time in Italy, Erasmus had expanded the collection to over three thousand items, many accompanied by explanatory notes that are often, in fact, brief essays on political and moral topics. He had also changed the title to Adagiorum Chiliades (the thousand proverbs). This was the title it retained in all subsequent editions.

By his death, Erasmus had compiled 4,658 adages in his collection. Many have become commonplace in our everyday language, and we owe our use of them to Erasmus. Among these are:

Make haste slowly 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 show the middle 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 To swallow the hook The bowels of the earth

From heaven to earth The dog is worthy of his dinner To weigh anchor To grind one's teeth Nowhere near the mark Complete the circle In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king A cough for a fart 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 cup and 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

[edit] Context

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, as well, an expression of the new humanist emphasis in education. The Adagia could only have been possible in the new world of European education, 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 the medieval period. 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' collection was among the most popular volumes of the century.

Source: Collected Works of Erasmus, Volume 33, University of Toronto Press, 1991

[edit] References

• Kathy Eden. (2001). Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property and the 'Adages' of Erasmus. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

• Thomas Greene. (1982). The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

• G.K. Hunter. (1951). "The Marking of Sententiæ in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances." The Library 5th series 6. 171-188.

• James McConica. (1991). Past Masters: Erasmus. Oxford University Press.

• Speroni, C. (1964). Wit and wisdom of the Italian Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press.

[edit] External links

• List of the proverbs from the 1700 Leiden edition, Leiden University.