A DECLAMATION BY DESIDERIUS ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM
Heavens, how they gesticulate and make proper changes of voice, how they drone on and fling themselves about, rapidly putting on different expressions and confounding everything with their outcry. Have you seen this guy of guys?Erasmus: Praise of Folly and Other Writings: Critical Commentary
Discourse on Free Will: Erasmus, Erasmus-Luther, Martin Luther
This article is posted now and will be annotated and keyed to Biblical topics in time.
[1] FOLLY SPEAKS: Whatever is generally said of me by mortal men, and I'm quite well aware that Folly is in poor repute even amongst the greatest fools, still, I am the one and indeed, the only one - whose divine powers can gladden the hearts of gods and men. Proof enough of this is the fact that as soon as I stepped forward to address this crowded assembly, every face immediately brightened up with a new, unwonted gaiety and all your frowns were smoothed away.
You laughed and applauded with such delightfully happy smiles that as I look at you all gathered round me I could well believe you are tipsy with nectar like the Homeric gods,
with a dash of nepenthe (to cause forgetfulness) too to drive away your cares,
though a moment ago you were sitting looking as gloomy and harassed as if you had just come up from Trophonius's cave.
[The phrase about the smoothing away of frowns is taken from' Terence (Adelphi, 839). 'Nepenthe' is the herb mentioned in Homer (Odyssey 4, 220) whose juice, mixed with wine, drove away all care Trophonius, murderer of his brother Agomedes, was buried in a cave which became the seat of an oracle famous for filling with gloom all those who came to consult it. He is mentioned by Homer and Pausanias, and is referred to by Erasmus in the Adages.]
Drugs of various kinds have been used for many centuries to reduce the distress of surgical operations. Homer wrote of nepenthe, which was probably cannabis or opium . Arabian physicians used opium and henbane . More recently powerful rum was administered freely to British sailors before emergency amputations were carried out on board ship in the aftermath of battle. Britannica Members
Opiates exert their main effects on the brain and spinal cord. Their principal action is to relieve or suppress pain. The drugs also alleviate anxiety; induce relaxation, drowsiness, and sedation; and may impart a state of euphoria or other enhanced mood.
Opiates achieve their effect on the brain because their structure closely resembles that of certain molecules called endorphins , which are naturally produced in the body. Endorphins suppress pain and enhance mood by occupying certain receptor sites on specific neurons (nerve cells) that are involved in the transmission of nervous impulses. Opiate alkaloids are able to occupy the same receptor sites, thereby mimicking the effects of endorphins in suppressing the transmission of pain impulses within the nervous system. Britannica Members
Now, when the sun first shows his handsome golden visage upon earth, or after a hard winter the new-born spring breathes out its mild west breezes, [The reference to mild west breezes is a reminiscence of Horace (Odes I 4,1;3,7,3;4,S,6).] it always happens that a new face comes over everything, new colour and a kind of youthfulness return; and so it only takes the mere sight of me to give you all a different look. For great orators must as a rule spend time preparing long speeches and even then find it difficult to succeed in banishing care and trouble from your minds, but I've done this at once and simply by my looks.
[2] Why have I appeared today in this unaccustomed garb? Well, you shall hear the reason if you have no objection to lending me your ears - no, not the ones you use for preachers of sermons,
but the ears you usually prick up for mountebanks, clowns and fools, the sort of ears that once upon a time our friend Midas listened with to Pan.
[Erasmus, having noted at the beginning that Folly herself is speaking and having drawn attention in the preceding section to the instantaneous effect of her appearance, now emphasizes once again that the declamation is put into the mouth of Folly by drawing attention to the dress in which she appears. Since it is Folly who is praising herself, and since therefore she might be taken to be blinded by self-love, Erasmus can pretend, as he did in the letter-preface, that he does not intend anything she says to be taken seriously.
Folly refers to the story of Midas,
whose ears were changed by Apollo into those of an ass for preferring Pan's flute to his own lyre (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 11,153 if. and Herodotus, 7, 33). Midas was at some pains to hide his ears, but his barber betrayed him. There is another reference to Midas in the Adages.]
I've a fancy to play the Sophist before you, and I don't mean by that one of the tribe today who cram tiresome trivialities into the heads of schoolboys and teach them a more than feminine obstinacy in disputation - no, I shall follow the ancients who chose the name Sophist in preference to the damaging title of philosopher or lover of wisdom. .
[The ancient Sophists were itinerant teachers, often of oratory, sometimes even of virtue. But the premium put by most of such teachers on the ability to defend any point of view, irrespective of its truth or moral value, explains the pejorative overtones which the term 'sophist' developed. Folly here touches on a theme frequent in the writings of Erasmus, whose blistering comments on the scholastic educational system focus on the accusation of 'sophistical cavilling'. There is a sense in which the humanist reform of education was always Erasmus's central concern. When, a little later on, Folly refers to speech as the least deceptive mirror of the mind, the reference is to a central tenet in the humanist philosophy of education, as well as to one' of Erasmus's own Apothegmata. Eloquence. or style, not only mirrors intellectual qualities, but can become the means of inculcating and developing them. From this central tenet, clearly implied by Erasmus in an important series of letters to Colet, derives the importance of the renaissance debate about the relationship between eloquence and philosophy (or between dialectic and rhetoric).]
Their concern was to provide eulogies in praise of gods and heroes, so it's a eulogy you are going to hear now, though not one of Hercules or Solon. It's in praise of myself, namely, Folly.
[3] Now, I don't think much of those wiseacres who maintain it's the height of folly and conceit if anyone speaks in his own praise; or rather, it can be as foolish as they like, as long as they admit it's in character. What could be more fitting than for Folly to trumpet her own merits abroad and 'sing her own praises'?
[Folly here quotes a Greek proverb in Greek, as she does three times more in the following lines. Most of the proverbs are comin ented on in the Adages. The Greek phrase for 'infinity doubled' indicates the greatest interval in musical harmony, popularly known (says Luster) as the double octave. Solon, the law-giver who reformed the Athenian constitution, is famous for the introduction of humane and liberal legal, social and political systems.]
Who could portray me better than I can myself? Unless, of course, someone knows me better than I know myself. Yet in general I think I show a good deal more discretion than the general run of gentry and scholars,
whose distorted sense of modesty leads them to make a practice of bribing some sycophantic speaker or babbling poet hired for a fee so that they can listen to him praising their merits, purely fictitious though these are.
The bashful listener spreads his tailfeathers like a peacock and carries his head high, while the brazen flatterer rates this worthless individual with the gods and sets him up as the perfect model of all the virtues - though the man himself knows he is nowhere near that; 'infinity doubled' would not be too far away.
Thus the wretched crow is decked out in borrowed plumage, the 'Ethiopian washed white', an 'elephant created out of a gnat'.
Finally, I follow that well-worn popular proverb which says that
a man does right to praise himself if he can't find any one else to praise him.Here, by the way, I can't help wondering at the ingratitude (if I may say so) or the dilatoriness of mankind. Everyone is only too anxious to cultivate me and freely acknowledges the benefits I bring, yet throughout all the ages nobody has ever come forward to deliver a speech of thanks in praise of Folly. Yet there has been no lack of persons ready to spend lampoil and lose their sleep working out elaborate speeches in honour of tyrants like Busiris and Phalaris, quartan fever, flies, baldness and plagues of that sort.
[This list of mock encomia is very similar to that of the letter-preface, on which see note 5, pp.57-8. Phalaris was a tyrant of the sixth century B.C., noted for roasting his victims inside a hollow bronze bull, whose encomium was written by Lucian.]
9) Diodorus Siculus Library 9.19.1 (Loeb)
[9.19.1] This Phalaris burned to death Perilaus, the well-known Attic worker in bronze, in the brazen bull. Perilaus had fashioned in bronze the contrivance of the bull, making small sounding pipes in the nostrils and fitting a door for an opening in the bull's side and this bull he brings as a present to Phalaris.
And Phalaris welcomes the man with presents and gives orders that the contrivance be dedicated to the gods. Then that worker in bronze opens the side, the evil device of treachery, and says with inhuman savagery, "If you ever wish to punish some man, O Phalaris, shut him up within the bull and lay a fire beneath it;
by his groanings the bull will be thought to bellow and
his cries of pain will give you pleasure
as they come through the pipes in the nostrils."When Phalaris learned of this scheme, he was filled with loathing of the man and says, "Come then, Perilaus, do you be the first to illustrate this; imitate those who will play the pipes and make clear to me the working of your device."
And as soon as Perilaus had crept in, to give an example, so he thought, of the sound of the pipes, Phalaris closes up the bull and heaps fire under it. But in order that the man's death might not pollute the work of bronze, he took him out, when half-dead, and hurled him down the cliffs. This tale about the bull is recounted by Lucian of Syria, by Diodorus, by Pindar, and countless others beside them
[4] From me you're going to hear a speech which is extempore and quite unprepared, but all the more genuine for that. Still, I wouldn't have you think I composed this to show off my talent, as the common run of orators do.
As you know, they can spend thirty whole years elaborating a speech which even then may not be theirs at all, and then swear they wrote it for a joke in a mere three days or even dictated it extempore.
For my part, I've always liked best to say 'whatever was on the tip of my tongue'.
[This proverb, in Greek in the Latin text, is induded in the Adages. Folly is referring to an affectation of literary facility verv common both in antiquity and in the renaissance. The notation 'from the country' at the end of the letter-preface is a common and recognizable variant of the same pose. Folly's encomium of herself is In fact a very carefully composed oration and, in spite of her disclaimer in the next sentence, she did in fact follow the classical paradigms for encomiastic oratory.]
None of you need expect me to follow the usual practice of ordinary rhetoricians and explain myself by definition, still less by division. It wouldn't bode well for the future either to limit and confine one whose divinity extends so far, or to cut her up when the whole world is united in worshipping her. And what purpose would it serve for a definition to produce a sketch which would be a mere shadow of myself when I am here before you, for you to look at with your own eyes? For I am as you see me, the true bestower of 'good things', called STULTITIA in Latin,' MOPIA in Greek
[5] But was there any need to tell you even as much as that, as if I didn't make it perfectly clear who I am from the look on my face, as they say? Anyone who argued that I was Minerva or Wisdom could easily be convinced of his mistake simply by the sight of me, even if I never spoke a word, though speech is the least deceptive mirror of the mind. I've no use for cosmetics, my face doesn't pretend to be anything different from my innermost feelings. I am myself wherever I am, and no one can pretend I'm not - especially those who lay special claim to be called the personification of Wisdom, even though they strut about like 'apes in purple and asses in lion-skins'.
[The Greek word for 'good things' is taken from Homer (Odyssey, 8,325) and Folly's assertion that 'the look on her face' makes things clear, alludes to Cicero's letters (To Atticus, 14, 13). The proverbs about 'apes in purple' and 'asses in lion-skins' are both the subject of Commentary in the Adages. Minerva was the Italian goddess of 'handicrafts frequently identified with Athene and hence with wisdom. Folly's assertion that she looks what she is has a special importance since Erasmus (followed here, as so often, by Rabelais) made much of the Silenus figure, whose point was that he appeared foolish and ugly while being wise and admirable. In the Sileni Alcibiadis of '515 Erasmus names Christ together with Socrates and Epictetus among the Silenus figures. The Enchiridion contains a reference to the scriptures which 'like the Silenus of Alcibiades, conceal their real divinity beneath a surface that is crude and almost laughable'. Folly just called herself the true bestower of all good things, perhaps]
However hard they try to keep up the illusion, their ears stick up and betray the Midas in them. There's an ungrateful lot of folk for you - members of my party if anyone is, and yet so ashamed of my name in public that they cast it freely at others as a term of strong abuse. They're 'complete fools' in fact, and yet each of them would like to pass for a wise man and a Thales; so wouldn't the best name for them all be morosophers or wise fools ?
[Thales was one of the seven sages, astronomer, geographer, geometer and philosopher. The important sentence in which Thales is mentioned is not easy to render; and the difficulty is increased by the fact that Kan's Latin text is certainly corrupt at this point, where it differs from Froben's 1515 version. Folly is saying that those of her faction who reject the name of fools and pretend to be wise are not only 'complete fools' in fact, but are wise to be so They ought therefore really to be called hybrid wise-fools. The 'complete fools' or mortals who pretend to be wise are also the subject of commentary in the Adages.
They are, however, also morosophers, which means at the same time both wise and foolish. Lucian uses the term of the wise who pretend to be foolish (Alexander, 40) and Rabelais uses it of Triboullet (Third Book, chapter 46).
Erasmus is playing ironically with the wisdom in Folly's eyes of being foolish. Just possibly, he is also hinting openly at the possibility that Folly and her friends are not so foolish as they pretend to he. At any rate, the purely burlesque pose drops for a minute to reveal the potential seriousness of what Folly will go on to say. The complex thought of Erasmus suggests that, while the followers of Folly pretend to be wise, they have the wisdom to be foolish. It is not farfetched to link this idea with the Pauline folly of the Gross and Erasmus's Own exploitation of the Silenus figure.]
[6] For at this point too I think I should copy the rhetoricians of today who fancy themselves practically gods on earth if they can show themselves twin-tongued, like horse leeches,
and think it a splendid feat if they can work a few silly little Greek words, like pieces of mosaic, into their Latin speeches, however out of place these are.
Then, if they still need something out of the ordinary, they dig four or five obsolete words out of mouldy manuscripts with which to cloud the meaning for the reader.
The idea is, I suppose, that those who can understand are better pleased with themselves,
and those who can't are all the more lost in admiration the less they understand.
Indeed there's a special sort of refined pleasure which all my followers take in paying their highest regard to any particularly exotic import from foreign parts, and the more pretentious among them have to laugh and clap their hands and 'twitch their ears' like a donkey does to show the others how well they can understand. 'So much for that'; now I return to my subject.
[The reference to leeches alludes to Ovid (Metamorphoses, 4, 568). Erasmus is having a joke at his own expense. Just as Folly's declamation is anything but improvised, so it goes to some lengths to drag in Greek proverbs. Folly's attack on literary pretentiousness ends with two Greek proverbs. In the 1529 colloquy The Cyclops, Erasmus makes a similarly ironic comment on his own activity.]
[7] Well, you have my name, gentlemen - but how shall I address you? As "most foolish"? What more honourable could the goddess Folly use in addressing her devotees? But first of all, with the help of the Muses, I'll try to explain my ancestry to you, which not very many people know. I didn't have Chaos, Orcus, Saturn nor Japetus, nor any other of those out-of-date mouldy old gods for a father, but 'Plutus', god of riches himself, the sole 'father of gods and men' whatever Homer and Hesiod and even Jupiter may say.
[Chaos, according to Hesiod, was at the origin of the world. Orcus, the Italian god often identified with Pluto or Hades, was one of the three sons of Kronos and god of the lower world. Saturn was the Roman god often identified with Kronos, father of Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto. Japetus was one of the Titans, son of heaven and earth and the father of Atlas. Plutus was the god of wealth and Hesiod the Greek author of uncertain date whose Theogany tried to bring the traditions concerning the gods into a consistent system. It also established their genealogy. Jupiter is of course the Roman sky-god and equivalent of Zeus. Homer and Hesiod frequently refer to Zeus as the 'father of gods and men'.
Folly, having presented herself in jester's garb, has pursued the introduction to her encomium of herself with a take-off of most of the classical introductory procedures. We have had an exordium, consisting of a greeting and a narratidn. Instead of the scholastic' partition, Folly has refused to explain herself 'by definition, still less by division', but has presented herself without cosmetics and with immediate effect. Erasmus seems to imply a contrast between evangelical humanism and the cosmetic procedures of the scholastics. We now move into a discussion of Folly's birth, parodying the genealogical section of the Greek paradigm for encomia, prior to identifying Folly's companions and moving on to the gifts she bestows.]
He has only to nod his head, today as ever before, for everything to be thrown topsy-turvy whether sacred or profane. War, peace, governments, councils, law-courts, assemblies, marriage-ties, contracts, treaties, laws, arts, gaieties, gravities (I'm out of breath) - in a word, the affairs of men, public and private, are all managed according to his will. Without his help the entire race of poets' divinities, or if I may be so bold, the chosen Olympian gods themselves either wouldn't keep alive at all, or would certainly fare very badly on the 'food they get at home'.
[The 'chosen Olympian gods' were normally said to be twelve in number, although Varro says twenty. St Augustine discusses the issue in The City of God (Book 7, chapter 2, 3, 33). Lucian says in his work on sacrifices that, without the food and drink from sacrifices,
the gods would have a thin time at home on nectar and ambrosia.]
If a man annoys Plutus not even Pallas Athene herself can save him. But anyone who wins his approval can tell mighty Jupiter to go hang himself, thunderbolt and all. 'It's my proud claim that he is my father.' And he didn't make me spring from his brain as Jupiter did that sour and stern Athene, but gave me Youthfulness for a mother, the loveliest of all the nymphs and the gayest too. Nor was he tied to her in dreary wedlock like the parents of that limping blacksmith, but 'lay with her in love', as Homer puts it, something much more delightful.
['Go hang himself' is the literal translation of the phrase from Juvenal (10, 53) to which Folly alludes. Folly here solemnly claims godly birth in the Homeric phrase which she quotes in Greek. The principal myth concerning Athene is that she had no mother but sprang fully armed out of Zeus's head when it was split with an axe by Hephaestus. Erasmus invents a new name for the nymph Youthfulness, normally called Hebe, the daughter of Hera and Zeus. She was the cup-bearer of the gods, here supposed to have conceived Folly by the young, vigorous and somewhat inebriated Plutus whom she served at table. Lijster says that Erasmus is implying that Folly is the product of the union between youth and riches. The limping blacksmith is Vulcan, god of fire, legitimate son of Jupiter and Juno, and the term 'hot-blooded' implies a reference to Horace (Odes, 3, 14, 27).]
Moreover, my father was not the Plutus in Aristophanes (make no mistake about that), half-blind, with one foot in the grave, but Plutus as he used to be, 'sound and hot-blooded with youth - and not only youth, but still more with the nectar he'd just been drinking, as it happened, neat and in generous cupfuls at a banquet of the gods.
[8] If you also want to know my birthplace, as people think it matters a lot in judging noble birth nowadays where an infant uttered its first cries, I wasn't born on wandering DeIos nor out of the waves of the sea nor 'in hollow caves', but on the very Islands of the Blest, where everything grows 'unsown, untilled'.
[Aristophanes was the Athenian author of comedies whose Plutus was staged in 388 B.C. According to legend (see Ovid, Metamorphoses 6, 333) Leto was delivered of Apollo after nine days labour on the island of Delos. The island, previously afloat, was anchored by Zeus to provide a birth-place for the twins Apollo and Artemis. Aphrodite, goddess of fertility, love and beauty, was born 'out of the waves' according to later Greek tradition while, according to Homer (Odyssey, 4, 403), Thetis and her sister Nereids were born in hollow caves. The 'Islands of the Blest', originally the winterless home of the happy dead for Homer, Hesiod and Pindar, are mentioned by Pliny and described by Horace. Folly also refers to Homer in the words 'unsown, untilled'. The islands were fertile without being cultivated, and free from illness, extremes of temperature and all forms of disease and blight. Everything was in abundant supply. In the renaissance the myth of the Islands of the Blest was frequently used as a vehicle either for satire or, as in More's Utopia, as a tentative means of exploring personal and social aspirations, in which form it later blended with the idea of Arcadia and became embedded in the pastoral tradition.]
Toil, old age and sickness are unknown there. There's no asphodel, mallow, onions, vetch and or any other such worthless stuff to be seen in the fields, but everywhere there's moly, panacea, nepenthe, marjoram, ambrosia, and lotus, roses and violets and hyacinths, and gardens of Adonis to refresh the eye and nose. Born as I was amidst these delights I didn't start life crying, but smiled sweetly at my mother straight away. And I certainly don't envy the 'mighty son of Kronos' his she-goat nurse, for two charming nymphs fed me at their breasts, Drunkenness, daughter of Bacchus, and Ignorance, daughter of Pan.
[The list of worthless plants is compdounded from various passages of Hesiod and Horace, although it looks as if Erasmus mistook a reference in Horace to seaons for an allusion to the common vegetable. Asphodel is mentioned as a poor man's vegetable by Hesiod (Works and Days, 42) and by Pliny (Historia naturalis, 21,108). In the second list moly is the wonderful herb (Odyssey, 10, 305) given by Hermes to Odysseus to preserve him from Circe's seductions. Panacea (Pliny, Historia naturalis, 25, ii) cures all ills.
Nepenthe drives away care. Marjoram is the aromatic herb and ambrosia, the food of the gods, is also the name given to a fragrant herb in Dioscorides and Pliny. The lotus was the food of the Lotophagi which made the eater forget his own country and desire to live in Lotusland (Odyssey, 9, 82 if.). The gardens of Adonis, god of vegetation and fertility, mentioned by Erasmus in the Adages, were pots filled with short-lived seasonal plants at his spring festival. The mighty son of Kronos is Homer's description of Zeus, quoted by Folly in Greek (Iliad, 2, 403). Zeus was hidden away in Crete by his mother Rhea to save him from being swallowed by his father. In Crete Zeus was reared on the milk of the she-goat Amalthea.
Erasmus invents Greek names for Drunkenness and Ignorance. The connexion between Bacchus and his daughter Drunkenness is clear.
Pan, the father of Ignorance, was the half-goat Arcadian god, frightening, angry and haunter of wildernesses. Although Folly boasts here that she was nursed by Drunkenness and Ignorance, it is important not to forget that the intoxication induced by Bacchus became in renaissance authors like Rabelais and Pontus de Tyard a figure of the divine 'furor' of the Platonist tradition which, in Marsiho Ficinp, was the beginning of the soul's reunification in its ascent to beatitude. In the same way, ignorance is at this date an equivocal concept since some at least of the evangelical humanists were heavily indebted to the idea of a 'learned ignorance' used by Nicolas of Cusa in his de docta ignorantia to describe human receptivity to divine knowledge. Postel, Bigot and Rahelais were to make Pan, here the father of Ignorance, into a figure of Christ, the Good Shepherd, an identification suggested by Paul Marsus's commentary on Ovid's Fasti. It is difficult to know whether Erasmus intended the ambivalence in Folly's nurses. ]
You see them both here along with the rest of my attendants followers, but if you want to know all their names, you'll have to hear them from me in Greek.
[9] This one you see with her eyebrows raised is, of course, Philautia, Self-love. The one clapping her hands with laughter in her eyes is Kolakia, Flattery. The sleepy one who looks only half-awake is Lethe, Forgetfulness, and this one leaning on her elbow with her hands folded is Misaponia, Idleness. This one wearing a wreath of roses and drenched in scent is Hedone, Pleasure. The one here with the rolling eyes she can't keep still is Anoja, Madness, and this plump one with the well-fed look is called Tryphe, Sensuality. You can see there are also two gods amongst the girls; one is called Comus, Revelry, and the other Negretos Hypnos, Sound Sleep. This, then, is the household which serves me loyally in bringing the whole world under my sway, so that even great rulers have to bow to my rule.
[This section marks the end of that part of the declamation which deals with Folly's birth and education. She will now proceed to the body of the encomium dealing with achievements and attributes. The list of her companions is a variation on the list of deadly sins. Only Philautia plays any significant part in the subsequent declaniation. Kulakia is a name coined by Erasmus. Lethe is the underworld river of mythology from which the shades of the dead drank and then forgot their earthly existence. Misaponia is a term for laziness used by Lucian. Hedone, Anoia and Tryphe are the Greek words for pleasure, madness and sensuality. Comus is the god of revelry and Negretos Hypnos is an Homeric expression for deep sleep (Odyssey, r3, 79). Folly's list of companions by whose help she rules might, if it were less humanist in form, have come from some medieval sermon or allegoiy.]
[10] You've heard of my birth, upbringing and companions. Now I don't want it to seem that I claim the name of goddess without good reason, so please pay attention and learn what great advantages I bring to gods and men alike, and how far my divinity extends. For if being a god means helping mortals, as someone sensibly wrote, and if those who introduced mortals to wine or grain, or some other commodity, deserved their admission to the council of the gods, why shouldn't I rightly be recognized and named the Alpha of all the gods, when I dispense every benefit to all alike?
[The statement that it is the function of the gods to help men comes from Pliny (Historia naturalis, 2, 5). In Revelation, i, 8, God reveals himself as the 'Alpha and the Omega', that is the beginning and end of all things signified by the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. This main section of Folly's declamation dealing with her powers takes up very nearly half its total length and leads on to the consideration of Folly's followers which starts in section forty-eight.]
[11] First of all, what can be sweeter or more precious than life itself? And to whom is it generally agreed life owes it's beginning if not to me? For it certainly isn't the spear of 'mighty-fathered' Pallas or the shield of 'cloud-gathering' Jupiter which fathers and propagates the human race. Even the father of the gods and king of men who makes the whole of Olympus tremble when he bows his head has to lay aside that triple-forked thunderbolt of his and that grim Titanic visage with which he can terrify all the gods whenever he chooses, and humble himself to put on a different mask, like an actor, if he ever wants to do what he always is doing, that is, to make a child. And the Stoics, as we know, claim to be most like the gods.
[It is Homer who refers to Athene, daughter of Zeus, as 'mighty-fathered' (Iliad, 5,747) and to Zeus himself, 'father of gods and men' as 'cloud-gathering' (Iliad, I, 160 and 470). The reference is to his thunderbolts. It is Virgil (Aeneid, 9,106) who talks of the terror he inspires and Ovid who mentions his three-forked lightning (Metamorphoses, 2, 848). The mention of the Titanic visage implies a reference to Lucian (e.g. Icaromenippus, 23) who used the phrase on several occasions. The word for 'making a child', in Greek in the Latin text, is a coinage of Erasmus.
The ethical doctrines of the Stoics, which they regarded as based on a rigorously deductive system, centred on the suppression of passion and the following of reason and nature.
Since, however, some early Christian writers like Clement of Alexandria, drawing on neoplatonist as well as on stoic ideas, held that the suppression of passion demanded the total hegemony in man of spirit over matter, the stoic sage was therefore endowed with the spiritual elevation, measured in terms of freedom from matter and rationality of behaviour, of God himself.
The idea that the sage is the equal of God was to be defended by some sixteenth-century Christian Stoics such as Justus Lipsius and attacked as impious by representatives of a more rigorously Augustinian tradition of Christian spirituality. Erasmus himself was to explicit certain stoic themes and ideas, particularly those which, unlike this one, derived from Epictetus.]
But give me a man who is a Stoic three or four or if you like six hundred times over, and he too, even if he keeps his beard as a mark of wisdom, though he shares it with the goat, will have to swallow his pride, smooth out his frown, shake off his rigid principles, and be fond and foolish for a while. In fact, if the philosopher ever wants to be a father it's me he has to call on - yes, me. And I may as well speak more frankly to you in my usual way. What is it, I ask you, which begets gods or men - the head, the face, the breast, hand or ear, all thought of as respectable parts of the body? No, it's not. The propagator of the human race is that part which is so foolish and absurd that it can't be named without raising a laugh. There is the true sacred fount from which everything draws its being, not the quarternion of Pythagoras.
[The Stoics, like the Cynics, wore a characteristic uniform of beard, cloak and stick. The first four whole numbers were the basis for the cosmic system of the Pythagoreans, and so the 'sacred fount' of all natural. During the renaissance there was a serious discussion about the seat of the soul and its affections in the various parts of the body and, in the Enchiridion, Erasmus had adopted a modification of the Platonist view, giving desire to the lower part of the body. Here, however, as when she refers to the Stoics, Folly is in lighter mood. She goes on after Juvenal (6, 43), to talk of the 'halter of matrimony', although Erasmus elsewhere treats that subject seriously, too.]
Just tell me, please, what man would be willing to offer his neck to the halter of matrimony if he applied the usual practice of the wise man and first weighed up its disadvantages as a way of life? Or what woman would ever agree to take a husband if she knew or thought about the pains and dangers of childbirth and the trouble of bringing up children? So if you owe your existence to wedlock, you owe the fact of wedlock to madness, my attendant Anoia, and can see how much in fact you owe to me. And if a woman has once had this experience, would she be willing to repeat it without the divine aid of Lethe, who helps her to forget? Venus herself, whatever Lucretius says, would never deny that she would be weakened and shorn of her power if my own divinity didn't come to her aid. Thus from that amusement of mine, drunken and absurd as it is, spring haughty philosophers and their, present day successors who are popularly called monks, kings in their purple, pious priests and thrice-holy pontiffs; and finally, the whole assembly of the poets' gods, now so numerous that Olympus itself, for all its spaciousness, can scarcely hold such a crowd.
[Lucretius, author of the de rerum natura, starts his poem with an invocation to Venus. goddess of love. 'Kings in their purple' refers to Horace (Odes, 1, 3S-12). The parenthesis on 'those popularly called monks' foreshadows the sustained later attack. Monks, as Erasmus was fond of pointing out, were not instituted by Christ.]
[12] But I shouldn't claim much by saying that I'm the seed and source of existence unless I could also prove that whatever advantages there are all throughout life are all provided by me. What would this life be, or would it seem worth calling life at all, if its pleasure was taken away? I hear your applause, and in fact I've always felt sure that none of you was so wise or rather so foolish - no, I mean so wise - as to think it could.
[Folly has by now come near to laying down her ironic pose by appearing to argue sensibly. Erasmus here recalls us, and himself, too, to the convention he has established inside which foolishness is sense for Folly. However, Folly immediately goes on to argue seriously, so that Erasmus has put the reader in a situation in which he can no longer be sure what is serious and what is not. The stage is now set both for Erasmus's attack on aspects of sixteenth-century society and for his defence that they are only the outpourings of Folly.]
Even the Stoics don't despise pleasure, though they are careful to conceal their real feelings, and tear it to pieces in public with their incessant outcry, so that once they have frightened everyone else off they can enjoy it more freely themselves. I'd just like them to, tell me if there's any part of life which isn't dreary, unpleasant, graceless, stupid and tedious unless you add pleasure the seasoning of Folly. I've proof enough in Sophocles, a poet who can never be adequately praised, who pays me a really splendid tribute in the line
'For ignorance provides the happiest h'fe'.
[The line, of Sophocles is from his Ajax (L 554). Technically it is true to say that the Stoics, or some of them, did not despise the pleasure which was not a passion but a 'rational affection'. Erasmus, as usual, is making learned fun and perhaps remembering that, for Seneca, the 'pleasure' which is the final end of human endeavour is for the Epicurean identified with the 'virtue' which the Stoics cultivate (de beata vita, 13).]
But now let's take the facts in order.
[13] First of all, everyone knows that by far the happiest and universally enjoyable age of man is the first. What is there about babies which makes us hug and kiss and fondle them, so that even an enemy would give them help at that age? Surely it's the charm of folly, which thoughtful Nature has taken care to bestow on the newly-born so that they can offer some reward of pleasure to mitigate the hard work of bringing them up and win the liking of those who look after them. Then follows adolescence, which everyone finds delightful, openly supports and warmly encourages, eagerly offering a helping hand. Now whence comes the charm of youth if not from me? I've seen to it that youth has so little wisdom and hence so few vexations. It's a fact that as soon as the young grow up and develop the sort of mature sense which comes through experience and education, the bloom of youthful beauty begins to fade at once, enthusiasm wanes, gaiety cools down and energy slackens. The further anyone withdraws from me the less and less he's alive, until 'painful age' comes on, that is, old age with its troubles, unwelcome not only to others but just as much to oneself.
[This section contains verbal reminiscences of Virgil, Seneca and Horace. The Greek phrase for 'painful age' is taken from Homer (Iliad, 8, 103) while that, a little later, for 'second childhood' comes from Lucian (Saturn. 9). Erasmus comments on it in the Adages, as' he also does on the proverb from Apuieius which Folly goes on to quote, 'I hate a small child too wise for his years.']
This too would be intolerable to man if I weren't at his elbow out of pity for all he has to bear. Just as the gods of fiction often come to the aid of the dying with some metamorphosis, so do I recall people who are on the brink of the grave, as far as possible, to childhood once again. Hence the aptitude of the popular expression, second childhood. And if any of you are interested in my method of transformation, I'm quite willing to tell you. The spring belonging to my nymph Lethe has its source in the Islands of the Blest, and what flows through the underworld is only a trickle of a stream. There I take them, so that once they have drank deep draughts of forgetfulness the cares of the mind are gradually washed away and they recover their youth. I know they're called silly and foolish, as indeed they are, but that is exactly what it means to become a child again. What else is childhood but silliness and foolishness? Its utter lack of sense is what we find so delightful. Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders; witness the oft-repeated saying "I hate a small child who's too wise for his years." And who could carry on doing business or having dealings with an old man if his vast experience of affairs was still matched by a vigorous mind and keen judgement? So I see to it that the old man is witless, and this sets him free meanwhile from all those wretched anxieties which torment the man in his senses. He is also pleasant company for a drink, and doesn't feel the boredom with life which a more robust age can scarcely endure. There are times when like the old man in Plautus he goes back to those three special letters AMO, but he'd be anything but happy, if he still had his wits.
[The reference here is to senile love in Plautus" Mercator (2, 2, 33) and the letters of course mean 'I love'.]
Meanwhile, thanks to what I do for him, he's happy, popular with his friends, even a welcome guest to bring life to a party. In Homer, the speech of old Nestor flows from his lips sweeter than honey, while that of Achilles is bitter, and the old men sitting pn the walls of Troy speak in 'lily-sweet' voices. On this reckoning old age surpasses even childhood, for that is pleasant but inarticulate and lacks the chief amusement in life - talk and still more talk. Add the fact that old people are always particularly delighted by children, and children by them
'For thus the goddess always brings like to like'
and there really is no difference between them except the old man's wrinkles and the number of birthdays he has Counted. [See the Iliad, I, 249 and 3, 152 for the references to Nestor and 'lily-sweet' voices. The verse comes from the Odyssey, 17, 218.] Otherwise they are exactly alike: white hair, toothless mouth; short stature, liking for milk, babbling, chattering, absurdity, forgetfulness, thoughtlessness, everything in fact.
The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living nor aware of death.
[14] Anyone who likes can go and compare this service of mine with the changes made by the other gods. What they did in anger, I'd rather not recount, but even when they're particularly well-disposed to people, they have a habit of turning them into a tree, a bird, a grasshopper, or even a snake - as if becoming something else were not just the same as dying.
[The first allusion is probably to Daphne, changed into a laurel tree after asking for help while being pursued by an amorous Apollo (Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 452 ff.). Ceyx and his wife Alcyone were punished for calling themselves Zeus and Hera. Ceyx was drowned and Alcyone threw herself into the sea after him. Both were changed into birds by the pity of the gods (Oyid, Metamorphoses, II, 410, if.). Tithonus, Priam's brother, was given by Zeus the gift of immortality but not that of eternal youth, for which Eos, goddess of the dawn, forgot to ask. When he became old and garrulous she finally shut him up in a room or, in the version of the legend deriving from Hellanicus, he was changed into a chirping grasshopper. Cadmus, the son of Agenor, built the Cadmea, citadel of Thebes, and introduced writing into Greece. In old age he and his wife Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, were turned into snakes in Illyria (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4, 57 if.).]
Now I restore? man unchanged to the best and happiest time of his life. But if mortals would henceforth have no truck with wisdom and spend all their time with me, there would be no more old age and they could be happy enjoying eternal youth. You must have seen those soured individuals who are so wrapped up in their philosophic studies or some other serious, exacting affairs that they are old before they were ever young; I suppose it's because their preoccupations and the unremitting strain of their keen concentration gradually saps their spirit and vitality. By contrast my morons are plump, sleek and glossy, typical Acarnanian porkers, as they say, and never likely to know any of the disadvantages of old age unless they pick up some infection from the wise. However, man isn't permitted to be happy every bit of his life. [
'Plump', 'sleek' and 'glossy' are words used by Horace of himself (Epistles, I, 4, 15-16) when he presents himself as a pig from the herd of Epicurus. The Acarnanian pigs are also mentioned in the Adages. In the renaissance Epicurus was usually taxed with denying the immortality of the soul and his followers were not unusually referred to as pigs from his herd. His view that man's final end was pleasure could be taken in a severe and almost stoic sense, as Seneca interpreted it, or as something altogether less lofty, which explains something of the ambiguity of the renaissance attitude towards him. In the seventeenth century, Gassendi produced a full-scale Christian version of his philosophy.]
Then there's further good evidence in the common saying which is often quoted: "Folly is the one thing which can halt fleeting youth and ward off the relentless advance of old age." And there's good reason for what is generally said about the natives of Brabant, that increasing age brings other men wisdom, but they grow more and more foolish the nearer they approach old age. At the same time there's no people so cheerful in company or so little affected by the misery of growing old. Close to them as neighbours and also in their way of life are my Hollanders - for why shouldn't I call them mine? They're my devoted followers, so much so that they've earned a popular epithet of which they're not at all ashamed, indeed they make a special boast of it.
[The 'special boast' is the Dutch proverb that the older a Dutchman is, the stupider he is,
Hoe ouder, hoe hotter Hollander.
By claiming a special relationship with the Dutch, Folly is of course being ironic at Erasmus's expense.]
Off you go, you foolish mortals, find a Medea, Circe, [Circe is the holy prostitute in John's Revelation: Circe = church] Venus and Aurora, and some sort of a spring they can use to give you back your youth! But I alone possess this power and make use of it. My hands hold the magic philtre with which Memnon's daughter prolonged the youth of her grandfather Tithonus. I am the Venus by whose favour Phaon became young again to be loved so much by Sappho. Mine are the herbs, if there are any, mine the supplications received, mine the spring which can not only restore lost youth but (better still) preserve it for evermore. And if you all share the view that nothing is better than youth, nothing so hateful as old age, I think you must see how much you owe to me for maintaining such a blessing and driving such an evil away.
[15] But why am I still talking about mortals? Search the heavens, and then anyone who likes can taunt me with my name if he finds a single one of the gods who wouldn't be disagreeable and disliked if he weren't graced by my divine powers.
Why is Bacchus always a boy with long flowing hair?
Surely because he's irresponsible and drunk,
and spends all his life at banquets and dances, singing and revelling,
and never has any dealings with Pallas.In fact he's so far from asking to be thought wise that he's happy to be worshipped with merriment and fun. Nor does he take offence when given a name which means "foolish", in the Greek saying 'more foolish than Morychus'.
[Virgil describes the cult of Bacchus in the Georgics (2,380 if.). Bacchus is the Lydian name of Dionysus, and as this became more popular, the older, bearded figure of the god gave place to the youthful, almost effeminate figure of later Greek sculpture. The proverb concerning Morychus is discussed by Erasmus in the Adages. It apparently refers to one who neglects the places where important things are going on and alludes to a Sicilian statue of Bacchus which was outside his temple. Athenaeus tells us that Bacchus was known as Morychus. Folly goes on to refer to Bacchus's birth from the thigh of Jupiter. His mother Semele, tricked by a jealous Hera, had her request granted by Jupiter that he should come to her, as to Hera, in his full glory, which resulted in her death from his thunderbolts. Jupiter put the premature child into his thigh, whence in due course he was born. The 'Old Comedy' refers to Aristophanes' The Frogs.]
His name was changed to Morychus because the country people in their revels used wine-must and fresh figs to smear the statue sitting at the door of his temple. Then think of the insults flung at him in Old Comedy! "Stupid god," they would say, "just the sort to be born from a thigh."
Yet who wouldn't choose to be this light-hearted fool who is always young and merry and brings pleasure and gaiety to all rather than 'crooked-counselled' Jupiter wlio is universally feared, or old Pan who confounds everything with his sudden alarms, ash-grimed Vulcan, always filthy from his work in the smithy, or even Pallas herself who strikes terror with her Gorgon and spear and 'fixed grim stare'?
Why is Cupid always a boy? Simply because he's a joker and never shows 'sound sense' in word or thought. Why does the beauty of golden Venus never lose its bloom of youth? Surely because she's related to me and gets the colour of her complexion from my father. That's why Homer calls her 'golden Aphrodite'. And besides, she's always smiling, if we are to believe the poets or the sculptors who copy them. What deity did the Romans ever worship more devoutly than Flora, the mother of all delights?
['Crooked-counselled', is a word applied by Homer to Zeus and by Hesiod to Prometheus. Pan, the god of woods, was known for the terror ('panic') with which he inspired travelers. On Vulcan the smith, see note 13. p.71. Pallas Athene as goddess of war is frequently depicted with shield, lance, helmet and her goatskin cloak fringed with serpents and with the Gorgon's head in the centre. The 'fixed grim stare' is a reference to Sophocles (Ajax, 452). On Cupid, Folly refers to the Iliad (8, 524) and on Venus to the Odyssey (8, 337). Aphrodite was the classical Greek name for Venus. Flora is the goddess of flowering plants whose spring festival was renowned for its licentiousness.]
And if anyone cares to ask some searching questions of Homer and the other poets about the lives even of the sterner gods, he'll find folly everywhere. I don't think I need go into the behaviour of the others, as you're well aware of the love-affairs and goings on of Jupiter the thunderer himself, and how even that chaste Diana who ignored her sex and devoted herself to hunting could still lose her heart to Endymion. I only wish they could still hear their conduct ridiculed by Momus, as they often used to do at one time, but it isn't long since they lost their tempers and threw him and Até headlong down to earth because he disturbed the gods' carefree happiness with his pertinent interruptions.
[Jupiter's love affairs were notorious. Hesiod enumerates his seven wives, and there were of course numerous affairs with mortals. Diana, goddess of the moon, who fell in love with the beautiful sleeping hunter Endymion, had his sleep indefinitely prolonged by Jupiter in order to be able to embrace him every night without his knowledge. The Endymion legend is usually referred to Selene or Artemis. But Selene was the moon goddess and Artemis, the chaste goddess of the hunt, was the sister of the sun god Apollo. The Romans identified her with Diana, their moon goddess, so that Diana took over Artemis's functions as virgin hunter to give the legend as Folly refers to it.
Momus, although mentioned by Hesiod, is a literary rather than a mythological character. He is the fault-finder who mocks at his fellow-gods, normally depicted taking off his mask and associated with folly and stinging satire. Erasmus writes of him in the Adages. Até, the personification of blindness and infatuation, caused so much trouble among the gods, notably by leading Juno to deceive Jupiter, that Jupiter threw her down to earth, where she is responsible for discord and disaster (Iliad, 19, 91 if.).]
And not a single mortal thinks of offering hospitality to the exile, far from it - there's no room for him in the halls of princes where my 'Flattery' holds first place; she can no more get on with Momus than the wolf with the lamb. So now that they've got rid of him the gods can have their fun with much more gaiety and freedom, 'living an easy life' in fact, as Homer says, with no one to keep a sharp eye on them. What joke will that fig-wood Priapus not play?
And Mercury is up to all sort of tricks with his thefts and sleight-of-hand. Vulcan too has always acted the 'buffoon' at the banquets of the gods, and delighted the company by his limping or his taunts or the funny things he says.
Then there's that amorous old Silenus who is always obscenely dancing the 'cordax' along with Polyphemus stamping his 'ratatan', and the nymphs dancing a 'barefoot ballet'. The half-goat satyrs play Atellan farces,
Pan makes everyone laugh with his hopeless efforts at singing, and the gods would rather listen to him than to the Muses themselves, especially when the nectar has started to flow freely.
[Homer refers, in slightly different terms, to the 'easy life' of the gods in the Iliad (6, 138). Priapus, god of fertility, shrank to the garden-god and was depicted as grotesque rather than serious or impressive. Horace puts into his mouth that he was once a (useless) piece of fig-wood (Satires, I, 8, i). Mercury, the god of commerce and subsequently of theft, was responsible for stealing Apollo's cattle and, while being reproached for it, his quiver. Ludan tells us that Mercury stole Vulcan's tongs and in the Ode of Horace to which Folly refers (I, 10), Mercury's intervention to protect Priam on his midnight journey to recover the body of Hector is also mentioned.
Homer recounts how Vulcan or Hephaestus downed at the feasts of the gods, moving them to laughter at his Ump or by his scoffing (Iliod, I, ~68 and i8, 397). Silenus was the drunken and misshapen companion of Bacchus, and the 'cordax' an obscene dance which existed before the Old Comedy and was illustrative of the effects of debauchery. Polyphemus is one of the Homeric Cyclopes, who destroyed with a rock his rival Acis for the love of the nymph Galatea. The reference to the 'barefoot ballet' comes from Lucian's de saltatione (chapter 12). The satyrs were sylvan creatures, half-goat, half-man, and the Atellan farces, with stock characters and ritualized action, were noted for their obscenlty.
Pan was always considered to be musical, but his instrument was the shepherd's pipe.]
But I needn't say here what the gods are up to when they've drunk well and the banquet's over - absurdities like these often make me feel I can't stop laughing myself. It would really be better at this point to remember Harpocrates and keep silent, in case some god on Corycian Parnassus may be eavesdropping and hear us say things which even Momus couldn't get away with.
[Harpocrates, mentioned in the Adages, is the god of silence, depicted as a chubby child with his index finger covering his lips. The Corycian cave on Mount Parnassus, also mentioned in the Adages, is associated with unsuccessful attempts to conceal what one is doing. Folly's new reference to Momus underlines the irreverence with which she is discoursing on such apparently serious topics as the going on of the gods and paves the way for her equal irreverence later about contemporary ecclesiastics and their affairs.]
[16] But now it's time we left the gods in heaven and came down to earth for a spell, as Homer does. There too we shall see nothing happy and gay unless I've made it so. In particular, you observe how wisely mother Nature, the parent and creator of the human race, has seen to it that some spice of folly shall nowhere be lacking. By Stoic definition wisdom means nothing else but being ruled by reason; and folly; by contrast, is being swayed by the dictates of the passions. So Jupiter, not wanting man's life to be wholly gloomy and grim, has bestowed far more passion than reason - you could reckon the ratio as twenty-four to one. Moreover, he confined reason to a cramped corner of the head and left all the rest of the body to the passions. Then he set up two raging tyrants in opposition to reason's solitary power: anger which holds sway in the breast and so controls the heart, the very source of life, and lust whose empire spreads far and wide, right down to the genitals. How far reason can prevail against the combined forces of these two the common life of man makes quite clear. She does the only thing she can, and shouts herself hoarse repeating formulas of virtue, while the other two have only to bid her go hang herself and intensify their hateful opposition until at last their ruler is exhausted, gives up and surrenders.
[Erasmus's reference to 'Mother Nature' is a reminiscence of Cicero (de natura deorum, I, 8). The proportion of twenty-four to one is Lijster's interpretation of Erasmus's quantities. On the stoic opposition between reason and passion, see note 18, p. 75, and on the attribution of the passions to the various parts of the body, note 19, p.76. The reference here is to Plato's Timaeus (69d). The Phaedrus had contained the parable of the charioteer (reason) with his two horses (the noble and obedient passions and the wild, disobedient ones). The Timaeus goes on to ascribe the rational part of the soul to the head, the faculty of courage and anger to the part of the body near the heart, and desire to the lower part of the body. This was the doctrine, popularized by Cicero; which Erasmus quoted from Plato in the Enchiridion Militis Christiani. Plato himself, who regarded ethical activity as determined by rational judgement, ascrihed desire to the liver, and by widening the 'lower part of the body' to include the sexual organs, Erasmus,retained plausi. bility. for Plato's ascription of the soul's faculties to the three regions of the body. It is only under the inlluence of St Augustine that the later renaissance authors will reverse Plato's doctrine and put love into the heart.]
[17] But since man was born to manage affairs he had to be given a modicum, just a sprinkling, of reason, and in order to do her best for him in this matter Nature called on me for counsel as she had on other occasions. I was ready with a piece of advice worthy of myself: she should give him a Woman, admittedly a stupid and foolish sort of creature but amusing and pleasant company all the same, and she could share his life, and season and sweeten his harsh nature by her folly. For Plato's apparent doubt whether to place Woman in the category of rational animal or brute beast is intended to point out the remarkable folly of her sex. If ever a woman wants to be thought wise she only succeeds in being doubly foolish, just as if one enters an ox for a wrestling match, they say, one can't hope for the approval and support of Minerva. The defect is multiplied when anyone tries to lay on a velleer of virtue and deflect a character from its natural bent. As the Greek proverb puts it, an ape is always an ape even if clad in purple; and a woman is always a woman, that is, a fool, whatever mask she wears.
[Folly's reference to Plato's doubts about whether women were human or animal (Timaeus, 90e) does not give a fair idea of what either Plato or Frasmus thought. Rabelais borrows this reference for the Third Book (chapter 32). The two proverbs in this paragraph are both commented on in the Adages. That concerning Minerva refers to the attempt to teach something to someone who Cannot understand. The idea that women's folly sweetens the harsh nature of men oomes from Aulus Gellius (15, 2~, 2).]
But I don't think the female sex is so foolish as to be angry with me for attributing folly to them, seeing that I am Folly, and a Woman myself. If they look at the matter in the right way they must see that it's entirely due to folly that they are better off than men in many respects. In the first place they have the gift of beauty which they rightly value above everything else, for it ensures their power to tyrannize over tyrants themselves. Besides, that unkempt look, rough skin, bushy beard and all the marks of old age in a man can only come from the corrupting influence of wisdom, seeing that a woman always has smooth cheeks, gentle voice, soft skin and a look of perpetual youth. Next, what else do Women desire in this life but to give maximum pleasure to men? Isn't this the purpose of all their attention to their persons, all that make.up, bathing, hair-dressing and all those ointments and perfumes, as well as so many arts of arranging, painting and disguising face, eyes and skin? Now, does anything count more in Winning them men's favour than their folly? There's nothing which men won't permit to Women, and for no other return than pleasure, but it's their folly which makes women delight them. No one will deny the truth of this who considers the nonsense a man talks with a Woman and the silly things he does whenever he wants to enjoy the pleasure she gives. So there you have the source of life's first and foremost delight.
[18] However, there are some men, especially old men, who are more given to wine than to women, and find their greatest pleasure in drinking parties. Now whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.
In fact, if there's no one there to raise a laugh with his folly, genuine or assumed, they have to bring on a 'jester', one who's paid for the job, or invite some absurd hanger-on whose laughable, that is; foolish, remarks will banish silence and gloom from the company.
What was the point of loading the stomach with all those delicacies, fancy dishes and tidbits if the eyes and ears and the whole mind can't be fed as well on laughter, jokes and wit?
But when it comes to that sort of confectionery, I'm the only mistress of the art. And all the usual rituals of banquets, drawing lots for a king, throwing dice, drinking healths, 'passing round the cup', singing with a myrtle branch, dancing, miming - none of them was discovered for the benefit of the human race by the Seven Sages of Greece, but by me.
[The banquet rituals include choosing a 'king' or president to prescribe who will sing, how much he must drink and in general to direct the festivities (see Horace, Odes, i 4, i8). 'Drinking healths' refers to a sort of friendly competition. 'Singing with a myrtle branch' is a proverb considered in the Adages and refers to the habit of passing round a stick of myrtle, held bv the singer and given by him to the guest whom he wished to sing.]
The very nature of all things of this sort is that the more folly they have, the more they enrich man's life, for if that is joyless it seems scarcely worth calling life at all. But it can't fail to end up joyless unless you can find diversions of this kind to remove the boredom inseparable from it.
[19] But there will perhaps be some who have no use for this kind of pleasure, and find their satisfaction in the affection and companionship of their friends. Friendship, they're always saying, must come before everything. It is something even more essential than air, fire and water, so delightful that if it were removed from their midst it would be like losing the sun, and finally, so respected (if this is at all relevant) that even the philosophers do not hesitate to mention it amongst the greatest of blessings. Here again I can show that of that greatest blessing I am both poop and prow. And I'll demonstrate it not by the Crocodile's Syllogism or the Horned Sorites nor any other dialectical subtlety of that kind - no, with what is called sound common sense 1. can put my finger on the spot.
[The reference to 'poop and prow' is proverbial and is noted in the Adages. The Crocodile's Syllogism is mentioned by Quintilian and is a trick. The example normally given is that of a crocodile promising to return to its mother a child he has snatched. providing she can correctly forecast what he will do. If she says he will return it, she is wrong. If she says he will not; she is right, but only if he in fact does not. The Horned Sorites is also in Quintilian and is best illustrated by dilemmas of the type posed by the question 'Have you stopped heating your wife?' Among the philosophers who praaise the joys of friendship are the Stoics and Cicero. The tradition passed through St Ambrose into Christian writings and was strongly taken up both in the middle ages and in the renaissance, when friendship came to be considered as essentially disinterested, a union of wills divorced from desire and sensual inclination. The neoplatonist context of so rauch renaissance writing on the affections made friendship non-instinctive and, in spite of earlier gropings, it was not until the late sixteenth century that morally elevating friendship came to be considered even to be compatible with instinctively based affection. Erasmus, like the other humanists, reacted very strongly against the educational system largely focused round a knowledge of the next. complex rules of minor logic.]
Just think: winking at your friend's faults, passing over them, turning a eye, building up illusions, treating obvious faults as which call for love and admiration - isn't all that related to folly? One man showers kisses on his mistress's mole, another is charmed by the polypus on his dear lamb's nose, a father talks about the wink in his son's squinting eye - what's that, please, but folly pure and simple? Let's have it repeated, three and four times over, it is folly, and the same folly, which alone makes friendships and keeps friends together. I'm talking of ordinary mortals, none of whom is born faultless, and the best among them is the one with fewest faults. But among those Stoic philosopher-gods either no friendship forms at all, or else it is a sour and ungracious sort of relationship which only exists between very few of them - I hesitate to say it doesn't exist at all, for most men have their foolish moments, or rather, everyone is irrational in various ways, and friendship joins like to like. But if ever some mutual good will does arise amongst these austere characters it certainly can't be stable and is unlikely to last long, seeing that they're so captious and far keener-eyed to pick out their friends' faults than the eagle or the Epidaurian snake. Of course they're blind to their own faults and simply don't see the packs hanging from their backs.
[Most of this paragraph so far is a reminiscence of Horace, from whom it quotes and whom it paraphrases (Satires, i, 3). The eagle's eye is proverbially acute. The Epidaurian snake mentioned by Horace is Asdepius, Greek hero and god of healing, whose symbol was a snake, often coiled on a staff, and who originally came intQ prominence at Epidaurus. the site of his first and principal shrine. He is said to have come to Rome in the form of a snake.]
It's in man's nature for every sort of character to be prone to serious faults. In addition, there are wide variations of age and interests, as well as all the lapses and mistakes and accidents of mortal life. Consequently the delights of friendship couldn't last a single hour among such Argus-eyed folk without the addition of what the Greeks aptly named 'good-nature', a word we can translate either as folly or as easygoing ways. Besides, isn't Cupid himself, who is responsible for creating all relationships, totally blind, so that to him 'ugliness looks like beauty'? And so he sees to it that each one of you finds beauty in what he has, and the old man loves his old woman as the boy loves his girl. This happens everywhere and meets with smiles, but nevertheless it's the sort of absurdity which is the binding force in society and brings happiness to life.
[Argus had eyes in the back of his head. The Greek word for 'good nature' is taken from Plato's Repubhc (401e). Cupid is represented as blind both because the lover sees no defects in the object of his love and on account of the ill-assorted relationships over which he presides. The Greek phrase for 'ugliiaess looks like beauty' comes from Theocritus (6, 19) and the proverbial expression 'the old man loves his old woman' is treated in the Adages. At the end of this paragraph. Folly suggests that love, however absurd, is the binding force of society. This is an allusion to the celebrated neoplatonist notion of love as the 'vinculum Mundi'. The renaissance neoplatonists, following Plotinus, saw the 'vinculum Mundi' in terms of God's love for men and men's love for one another and for God, so that love was circular, beginning and ending in God. Panurge, in the mock encomium of the early chapters of Rabelais's Third Book will facetiously hold that debt is the bond of society.]
[20] What I've said about friendship is much more applicable to marriage, which is nothing other than an inseparable union for life. Goodness me, what divorces or worse than divorces there would be everywhere if the domestic relations of man and wife were not propped up and sustained by the flattery, joking, complaisance, illusions and deceptions provided by my followers! Why, not many marriages would ever be made if the bridegroom made prudent inquiries about the tricks that little virgin who now seems so chaste and innocent was up to long before the wedding. And once entered on, even fewer marriages would last unless most of a wife's goings-on escaped notice through the indifference or stupidity of her husband. All this can properly be attributed to folly, for it's she who sees that a wife is attractive to her husband and a husband to his wife, that peace reigns in the home and their relationship continues. A husband is laughed at, cuckolded, called a worm and who knows what else when he kisses away the tears of his unfaithful wife, but how much happier it is for him to be thus deceived than to wear himself out with unremitting jealousy, strike a tragic attitude and ruin everything!
[21] In short, no association or alliance can be happy or stable without me. People can't long tolerate a ruler, nor can a master his servant, a maid her mistress, a teacher his pupil, a friend his friend nor a wife her husband, a landlord his tenant, a soldier is comrade nor a party-goer his companion, unless they sometimes have illusions about each other, make use of flattery, and have the sense to turn a blind eye and sweeten life for themselves with the honey of folly. I daresay you think this is the last word on the subject, but there are more important things to come.
[22] Now tell me: can a man love anyone who hates himself? Can he be in harmony with someone else if he's divided in himself, or bring anyone pleasure if he's only a disagreeable nuisance to himself? No one, I fancy, would say he can unless there's someone more foolish than Folly. Remove me, and no one couH put up with his neighbour, indeed, he'd stink in his own nostrils, find everything about himself loathsome and disgusting. The reason is that nature, more of a stepmother than a mother in several Ways, [The idea that nature is only a stepmother is a well-known renaissance topos oliginating in Quintilian.] has sown a seed of evil in the hearts of mortals, especially in the more thoughtful men, which makes them dissatisfied with their own lot and envious of another's. Consequently, all the blessings of life which should give it grace and charm are damaged and destroyed. What good is beauty, the greatest gift of the gods, if it is tainted by the canker of decay? Or youth, if it is soured and spoiled by the misery of advancing age? And finally, is there any duty throughout life which you can perform gracefully as regards yourself or others (for the importance of graceful performance extends beydnd mere skill and covers every action) unless you have Self-love at hand to help you, Self-love who is so prompt to take my place on all occasions that she is rightly called my sister?
What is so foolish as self-satisfaction and seif-admiration? But then what agreeable, pleasant or graceful act can you perform if you aren't self-satisfied?
Take away this salt of life and immediately the Orator's words will freeze on his lips, the musician will please no one with his tunes, the actor and his posturings will be hissed off the stage, the poet be a laughing-stock along with his Muses, the painter and his works deemed valueless, and the doctor starve amidst his remedies.
Finally, you'll look like ugly Thersites and old Nestor instead of handsome Nireus and young Phaon, a pig rather than Minerva, and a speechless child and a boor instead of an eloquent and civilized man;
which shows how necessary it is for a man to have a good opinion of himself, give himself a bit of a boost to win his own self-esteem before he can win that of others.
And since for the most part happiness consists in being willing to be what you are, my Self-love has provided a short cut to it by ensuring that np is dissatisfied with his own looks, character, race, posttion and way of life. And so no Irishman would want to change places with an Italian, nor Thracian with an Athenian, nor Scythian with an inhabitant of the Islands of the Blest. What remarkable foresight of nature it was, to level out all these variations and make all alike! Where she has withheld some of her gifts she generally adds a tiny bit more Self-love - but it's silly of me to say this, seeing that Self-love is her greatest gift. Just let me add that you'll find no great deed performed without my prompting and no great achievement unless I was responsible.
[Nireus, according to Homer, was the most handsome of the Greeks, after Achilles, but a weakling (Iliad, 2, 671) and Thersites was the ugliest (Iliad, 2, 212). Nestor is said by Ovid to have lived to be more than two hundred years old (Metamorphoses, 12, 187, if.) while Phaon was rejuvenated by Venus (see note 29, p.82). The comparison between Nireus and Thersites occurs in Ovid and the allusion to Minerva corresponds to a reference in the Adages. Folly quotes Martial on being willing to he what you are (lo, 47,)]
[23] Of all deeds which win praise, isn't war the seed and source? But what is more foolish than to embark on a struggle of this kind for some reason or other when it does more harm than good to either side? For those who fall in battle, like the men of Miegara, are 'of no account'. When the mail-clad ranks confront each other and the trumpets "blare out their harsh note", what use, I ask you, are those wise men who are worn out with their studies and can scarcely draw breath now their blood is thin and cold? The need is for stout and sturdy fellows with all the daring possible and the minimum of brain.
Of course some may prefer a soldier like Demosthenes, who took Archilochus's advice and had scarcely glimpsed the enemy before he threw away his shield and fled, as cowardly in battle as he was skilled in speech-making. People say that judgement matters most in war, and so it does for a general, I agree, but it's a soldier's judgement, not a philosopher's.
Besides, it's the spongers, pimps, robbers, murderers, peasants, morons, debtors and that sort of scum of the earth who provide the glories of war, not the philosophers and their midnight oil.
[The men of Megara also figure in the Adages. This is a proverbial expression for people of no account. The harsh note of the trumpets alludes to Virgil (Aeneid; 8, 2). The incidents concerning the Athenian orator Demosthenes and the advice of Archilochus the Ionic poet are both mentioned in Plutarch. Erasmus was withering in his satire on the futility of war, inheriting his view from Colet and the tradition of neoplatonist evangelism. He shared it with More and, even more, with Rabelais. Among Erasmus's own writings against war are the famous Dulce bellum inexpertis from the 151S Adages and the 1517 Querela pacis, a 'complaint' put into the mouth of Peace.]
[24] As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic oracle. It showed little enough wisdom in its judgement,
for whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter.
Yet on one point the man was sensible enough - he refused to accept the epithet wise but attributed it to the god.'He also held the view that the wise man should steer clear of taking part in politics, though maybe he should have gone further and advised done who wants to be counted a man to keep well away from wisdom.
What drove him to drink the hemlock after his trial if not his wisdom? For while he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea's foot and marveling at a midge's humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life. And at the master's side in his hour of peril stands his pupil Plato, a splendid advocate, I must say, when he was so overwhelmed by the clamor of the crowd that he could hardly get out half a sentence.
Then what shall I say about Theophrastus? When he stepped forward to speak he was suddenly struck dumb as if he'd seen a wolf. Isocrates might have fired the military-minded in time of war, but he was so timid by nature that he never ventured to open his mouth.
Cicero, the father of Roman eloquence, always rose to speak in an unseemly state of agitation like a child with hiccups. Quintilian explains this as a mark of an intelligent orator conscious of the risks he ran, but in saying so,
doesn't he openly admit that wisdom is an obstacle to successful performance? If people are half-dead of fear when they have to fight only with words, what will they do if the issue must be settled by the sword?
[The passage on Socrates draws on several Platonic dialogues, and notably the Apology. There is also a reference to Aristophanes on the midges' humming (Clouds, 146 and 157). The anecdote about Plato's reaction to the crowd is from Diogenes Laertius (2, 41). The incident involving Theophrastus, the disciple of Aristotle, is of unknown origin unless, as Kan supposes, Erasmus bases his account on a misunderstanding of Cicero (Tusculan Disputations, 5, 9, 24). The effect of wolves is proverbial and is mentioned in the Adages. The mention of Isocrates, the Athenian orator, alludes to Cicero (de oratore, 2, 3, io). Cicero himself writes of his own nervousness when he spoke in public (pro Roscia Amerino, 4, 9). The reference Quintilian is to the Institutia oratoria, II, 1,43.P.F.L.-5]
And on top of all this, please heaven, that famous saying of Plato's is always quoted: "Happy the states where either philosophers are kings or kings are philosophers!"
But you look at history you'll find that no state has been plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.
The two Gatos are sufficient proof of this, I think, when one of them was a disturber of the peace of the republic with crazy denunciations, and the other shower his wisdom by defending the liberty of the Roman people, but in doing so completely destroyed it.
Then there are the families of Brutus and Cassius, the Gracchi brothers and even Cicero himself, who was just as much a scourge to the republic of Rome as Demosthenes was to Athens. As for Marcus Aurelius, we have to admit that he was a good emperor, but I could still deny him this distinction on tIle grounds that he was unpopular and disliked amongst his subjects for the very reason that he was so much of a philosopher. And even admitted that he was good,
he undoubtedly did more harm to Rome by leaving such a son as his than he ever benefited it by his administration.
In fact this type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evil of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind.
So it's well known that decree had a degenerate son, and the children of the great sage Socrates himself took after their mother rather than their father, as someone put it rather well: meaning, they were fools.
[ Plato's statement about philosopher.kings is from the Republic (5', 473d). Rahelais borrows this allusion for Gargantua (chapter 45). The Cato who is blamed by Folly for his denunciations is Cato the Censor (234-149 B.c.) who attacked the Scipios, became consul, and was noted for conservatism in a somewhat puritan tradition. The second Cato is Cato of Utica (95-46), moderate but unamiable, who joined cause with Pompey in 52 B.C. and who governed Utica in Pompey's interest during the civil war which Pompey lost to Caesar. Brutus and Cassius, oudawed by Octavian, lost the famous Battle of Philippi to Antony and Octavian. The Gracchi brothers were both reformers who attempted to undermine the authority of the senate by allying the rich business class with the plebs. Cicero was an intermittent enemy of Caesar and supporter of Pompey. Modern scholars would generally accept Folly's criticism of Marcus Aurelius. His son Commodus, sole emperor from A.D. i8o to 192, ruled by favourites and was much influenced by his concubine Marcia. He was obsessed by power and deeply antagonistic to the senate. Cicero's son, also Marcus Tuflius, born in 6~ B.C., is said to have heen idle, extravagant and devoted to the bottle.]
[25] One could put up with it somehow if these folk would play 'the ass with the lyre' only in public affairs and not be so utterly incompetent in every single thing in life.
Ask a wise man to dinner and he'll upset everyone by his gloomy silence or tiresome questions. Invite him to a dance and you'll have a camel prancing about.
Haul him off to a public entertainment and his face will be enough to spoil the people's enjoyment. He'll have to leave the theatre like Cato the Wise when he couldn't lay aside his scowl.
If he joins in a conversation, all of a sudden there's the wolf in the fable. If there's anything to be bought or an arrangement to be made, in fact if any one of those things has to be done without which our daily life can't be carried on, you'll call your wise man a blockhead, not a man.
It's quite impossible for him to be of any use to himself, his country or his family because he's ignorant of ordinary matters and far removed from any normal way of thinking and current practice.
And so inevitably he is also disliked, doubtless because of the vast discrepancy between ordinary life and minds like his.
For nothing happens in this world which isn't full of folly, performed by fools amongst fools. If any individual wants to make a stand against the rest, I'd recommend him to take his lead from Timon and move off to some wilderness where he can enjoy his own wisdom in solitude.
[The proverbial 'ass with the lyre' figures in the Adages, as do the prancing camel and the sudden silence caused by the wolf in the fable. Cato the Censor's serious frown is a commonplace of Latin literature. Lucian's dialogue Timon was translated by Erasmus in Timon of Athens cut himself wholly off from the world and would see no one but Alcibiades.]
[26] But to return to my subject. Take those wild sprung from rocks and trees - what power brought them together into a civilized society if not flattery? This is all that's meant by the lyre of Amphion and Orpheus. What was it which recalled the Roman mob to harmony in the state when it was plotting violence - a philosopher's speech?
Not a bit of it. It was a silly, childish fable made up about the belly and the other parts of the body.
A similar sort of story told by Themistocles about a fox and a hedgehog had the same effect. No sage's speech could ever have achieved so much as that fictitious white hind of Sertorius or the ridiculous anecdote invented about the famous Spartan with his two dogs, and the one about pulling the hairs out of a horse's tail, to say nothing of Minos and Numa who both fled the foolish mob by means of fantastic trumped up tales. It's absurdities like these that sway the mighty, powerful monster which is the common people.
[Amphion and Orpheus both come from the well-known renaissance list of musicians whose music produced extraordinary or magical effects. Amphion was given a lyre by Jupiter and, together with his brother, constructed the walls of Thebes by drawing the stones into position with his music. Orpheus, too, charmed -beasts, trees and stones with Apollo's lyre (see Horace, Ars poetica, 39! ff.). The legendary fable of the Belly and the Limbs which calmed the Roman mob and brought them back to Rome was reputedly told them by Menenius Agrippa in the fifth century B.C. (see Livy, 2, 32). Themistocles, the Athenian statesman, is said by Plutarch to have dissuaded the Athenians from throwing off the yoke of taxation by a fable in which a fox will not have the blood. sucking flies removed by a hedgehog on the grounds that'they would only be replaced by other unsatisfied ones.
According to Plutarch, Sertorius persuaded the Spaniards that the white hind signified that he was in Communication with the gods, and the anecdote about the Spartan, also from Plutarch, concerned Lycurgus who demonstrated to the Spartans the importance of education by showing them the difference between a trained and an untrained dog. The reference to the hairs from the horse's tail comes from an anecdote in Valerius Maximus (7, 3, 6) in which Sertorius showed his barbarian army the futility of trying to overcome the Romans in one great battle by demonstrating that the only way to pluck a horse's tail was one hair at a time. Minos was believed by his people to retire every nine years to Jupiter's grotto to be inspired by the god. Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, is said by Plutarch to have made his followers helieve he was advised by the nymph Egeria in a wood near Rome. Polly's reference to the gullibility of the common people is a Common renaissance topos. It is historically important as it indicates the new and exciting nature of the insights into social and personal possibilities among those who experienced them. Erasmus was to explore the natural rectitude of moral aspirations but, like Rabelais and the Pl6iade poets, he could only plausibly do so on the presupposition that he was dealing with the well-born. High birth was a condition of entry into The'J~me. But there are classical precedents, and both Horace and Plato regard the common people as a monster.]
[27] Again, what society ever took its laws from Plato or Aristotle or the teachings of Socrates? And what made the house of Decius choose to dedicate their lives to the gods of the underworld and brought Quintus Curtius to the abyss if not the vain hope of fame, the sweetest of all Sirens, though damned by your wise men to a remarkable degree? Nothing is so foolish, they say, as for a man to stand for office and woo the crowd to win its vote, buy its support with presents, court the applause of all those fools and feel self-satisfied when they cry their approval, and then in his hour of triumph to be carried round like an effigy for the public to stare at, and end up cast in bronze to stand in the marketplace.
[The reference to the house of Decius draws its point from the deaths of three of its members at war for their country. The young knight Quintus Curtius, according to legend, rode his horse Into an abyss which opened in the forurn after the auguries had said that it could be closed only when Rome's greatest treasure was thrown into it (Livy, 7, 6, s). The phrase 'cast in bronze' alludes to Horace (Satires, 2,3, 183).]
Then there are changes of first and second names, divine honours awarded to a nobody, official ceremonies devised to raise even the most criminal of tyrants to the level of the gods. All this is utterly foolish, and more than one Democritus is needed for these absurdities, every-one agrees. Yet from this source spring the deeds of valiant heroes to be lauded to the skies in the writings of so many eloquent'men. This same folly creates societies and maintains empires, officialdom, religion, law courts and councils in fact the whole of human life is nothing but a sport of folly.
[28] Now let us turn to the arts. What else has fired men's natural talents to devise and hand on to posterity so many disciplines' which they think remarkable if not their thirst for fame? With all their toil and sweat and sleepless nights men have thought to gain some sort of reputation, emptiest of acquisitions, and thereby showed themselves complete fools. Meanwhile it's Folly to whom you owe so many of life's major blessings, and the nicest thing of all is that you have someone else's madness to think for your enjoyment.
[29] Well, now I've proved that I must be given credit for courage and industry, shall I go on to lay claim to prudence? You might as well mix fire and water, I can hear someone say. But here again I believe I can succeed, if you'll continue to give me your ears and attention as before. First of all if prudence develops through experience, does the honour of possessing a claim to it rightly belong to the wise man who attempts nothing, partly through his sense of propriety, partly through his natural timidity, or to the fool who isn't deterred from anything either by the propriety Which he hasn't got or the dangers which he doesn't think about? The wise man seeks refuge in his books of antiquity and learns from them the pure subtleties of what the ancients say. The fool tries everything, meets his dangers at first hand, and thereby acquires what I'm sure is genuine prudence. That is something Homer appears to have seen,' despite his blindness, when he says 'even the fool is wise after the event'. For the two main obstacles of learning by experience are a sense of propriety which clouds the judgement and fear which advises against an undertaking once danger is apparent. Folly offers a splendid liberation from both of them. Few mortals realize how many other advantages follow from being free from scruples and ready to venture anything.
['Mixing fire and water' is one of Erasmus's Adages, as is, the saying of liomer that the fool is wise after the event (Iliad, '7, 32) and the reference to clouding the judgement. The advantages claimed by Folly for folly have again become serious ones.]
But if people prefer the sort of prudence which comes from forming opinions on life, please hear how far those who pride themselves on that account really are from having it. In tlie first place, it's well known that all human affairs are like the figures of Silenus described by Alcibiades and have two completely opposite faces, so that what is death at first sight, as they say, is life if you look within, and vice versa, life is death. The same applies to beauty and ugliness, riches and poverty, obscurity and fame, learning and ignorance, strength and weakness, the noble and the base-born, happy and sad, good and bad fortune, friend and foe, healthy and harmful - in fact you'll find everything suddenly reversed if you open the Silenus. Maybe some of you will think I've expressed this too philosophically; well, I'll speak bluntly, as the saying goes, to make myself clear.
[On the Silenus figure, see note 8, p.67. In his essay Sileni Alcibiadis for the Adages, Erasmus writes,'.. For it seems that the Sileni were small images divided in half, and so constructed that they could he opened out and displayed;
when closed they represented some ridiculous, ugly flute-player, but when they opened they suddenly revealed the figure of a god!' (Translated Margaret Mann Phillips, Erasmus on his Times: A Shortened Version of the Adages of Erasmus, Cambridge University Press, 1967. p.77.)
The phrase for 'speaking bluntly' also occurs in the Adages. Kan's text here differs from Froben's and is probably corrupt. The Latin contains an allusion to Minerva, identified with Athene as goddess of wisdom, and implies that lofty discourse can obscure the simplest things.]
We all agree a king is rich and powerful, but if he lacks all spiritual goods nothing belongs to him, and he's surely the poorest of men. And if he's addicted to a large number of vices he's no more than a cheap slave. We could philosophize about others in the same way, but one example will suffice. What's the point of this, someone will say. Hear how we'll develop the argument.
If anyone tries to take the masks off the actors when they're playing a scene on the stage and show their true natural faces to the audience, he'll certainly spoil the whole play and deserve to be stoned and thrown out of the theatre for a maniac.
For a new situation will suddenly arise in which a woman on the stage turns into a man, a youth is now old, and the king of a moment ago is suddenly Dama, the slave, while a god is shown up as a common little man.
[Dama is the name given by Horace to a Syrian slave (Satires, 2, 5, i8; 2, 7, s4). The phrase 'true natural faces' appears. in the Adages.]
To destroy the illusion is to ruin the whole play, for it's really the characterization and makeup which hold the audience's eye. Now, what else is the whole life of man but a sort of play?
Actors come on wearing their different masks and all play their parts until the producer orders them off the stage, and he can often tell the same man to appear in different costume, so that now he plays a king in purple and now a humble slave in rags.
It's all a sort of pretence, but it's the only way to act out this farce. At this point let us suppose some wise man dropped from heaven confronts me and insists that the man whom all look up to as god and master is not even human, as he is ruled by his passions, like an animal, and is no more than the lowest slave for serving so many evil masters of his own accord.
Or again, he might tell someone else who is mournng his father to laugh because the dead man is only just beginning to live, seeing that this life of ours is nothing but a sort of death. Another man who boasts of his ancestry he ight call low-born and bastard because he is so far removed from virtue, which is the sole source of nobility. If he had the same sort of thing to say about everyone else, what would happen? We should all think him a crazy madman. Nothing is so foolish as mistimed wisdom, and nothing less sensible than misplaced sense. A man's conduct is misplaced if he doesn't adapt himself to things as they are, has no eye for the main chance, won't even remember that convivial maxim 'Drink or depart', and asks for the play to stop being a play.
[The phrases for 'an eye for the main chance' and 'drink or depart' are both in the Adages.]
On the other hand, it's a true sign of prudence not to want wisdom which extends beyond your share as an ordinary mortal, to be willing to overlook things along with the rest of the world and wear your illusions with a good grace. People say that this is really a sign of folly, and I'm not setting out to deny it - so long as they'll admit on their side that this is the way to play the comedy of life.
[30] As for my next point - immortal gods, shall I speak out or keep silence? But why keep silent when it's something truer than truth? Though perhaps it would be better for a matter of such importance to summon the Muses from Helicon, seeing that the poets are always calling on them for help over the merest trifles. Come, then, for a while, daughters of Jove, while I show that no one can approach that perfect wisdom which the wise call the citadel of bliss unless Folly shows the way. First of all, it's admitted that all the emotions belong to Folly, and this is what marks wise man off from the fool; he is ruled by reason, the fool by his emot