Adagia

The Adagia is a vast compendium of Greek and Latin proverbs assembled and annotated by Erasmus of Rotterdam, first published in 1500 as 'Adagiorum Collectanea' with about 800 entries and expanded across the author's lifetime into more than 4,000. Each entry gives the proverb, its classical sources, and a short essay on its meaning and use — often digressing into satire on contemporary church and court.

The book was a bestseller of the sixteenth century. It gave educated Europeans a shared stock of classical sayings — 'know thyself', 'in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king', 'to leave no stone unturned', 'to call a spade a spade' — many of which entered vernacular languages permanently. English proverbs that feel native often trace back through the Adagia to Greek and Latin originals.

For quotation history, the Adagia is a landmark. It is one of the earliest works to treat proverbs as objects worth cataloguing, sourcing, and interpreting rather than merely repeating. Erasmus's method — quote, cite, explain — became the model for later collections, including Bartlett's four centuries afterwards.

Common mistake: quoting a proverb 'from Erasmus' as if he had coined it. Almost every entry in the Adagia is a proverb Erasmus found in earlier Greek or Latin authors; his contribution is the gathering and the commentary, not the invention. Correct attribution is usually to the classical source, with the Adagia named as the intermediary.