Adagia

From Textus Receptus

The compiler, Erasmus

Adagia (adagium is the singular form and adagia is the plural) is an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus' collection 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 proverbs. By 1508, after his stay in Italy, Erasmus had expanded the collection (now called Adagiorum chiliades or "Thousands of proverbs") to over three thousand items, many accompanied by richly annotated commentaries, some of which were brief essays on political and moral topics. The work, which continued to be expanded right up to his death in 1536 (to a final total of 4,151 essays), is the fruit of Erasmus' vast reading in ancient literature.

Commonplace examples from Adagia

Many of the adages have become commonplace in many European languages, and we owe our use of them to Erasmus. Among these in English 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

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 Humanism. 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' Adagia was among the most popular volumes of the century.

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.)

References

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.

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

External links

Adagia, complete Latin text online (base text used for the 2011 Belles Lettres translation in French)
Adagia, complete Latin text online (annotated and searchable text from volume II of the ASD Opera omnia)
List of the proverbs from the 1700 Leiden edition, Leiden University.
Proverbs taken chiefly from the Adagia (1814) explained and freely downloadable through the Internet Archive.

The King James Version 2023 Edition New Testament is now complete and in print format here.

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