Adagia

"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:

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

References

* 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.

External links

* [http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/Dutch/Latijn/ErasmusAdagia.html List of the proverbs] from the 1700 Leiden edition, Leiden University.