[In this essay, Eden shows how Erasmus takes the adage genre as a literary type and makes it a symbol of his philosophy of friendship and community. Eden focuses on Erasmus's adaptations of Pythagoras and Plato as primary instances of how the adage itself is an object or kind of property to be shared among friends in the ideal community.]

In 1508 eager readers received the Aldine edition of Erasmus's Adages, the Adagiorum chiliades. Replacing the much smaller Paris Collectanea of 1500, the Italian edition included among its many accretions and alterations both a new introduction and a different opening adage. In place of the prefatory letter to William Blount, Lord Mountjoy (Ep. 126, CWE, 1, 255-66), Erasmus substituted a fuller prolegomena or introduction (Ep. 211) that reworked portions of the earlier praefatio.¹ Then, following the new introduction, he displayed much more prominently, in first position, the ninety-fourth adage of the Paris edition, which reads in Greek, τὰ τω̑ν ϕίλων κοινὰ; in Latin, amicorum communia omnia, often translated into English as “friends hold all things in common” or “between friends all is common” (LB, II, 13F-14F; CWE, 31, 29-30). By his own account, moreover, Erasmus begins this vast compilation of ancient sayings in this way so that this particular proverb about friendship may serve as a favorable omen for the work as a whole (LB, II, 13F-14A; CWE, 31, 29).

While Margaret Mann Phillips and others have appreciated the marked relocation of this adage to initial position as evidence of Erasmus's deep commitment to amicitia—a well-documented feature of his lived experience, a constant topic throughout his literary works, and the focus of more than a few other adages²—I will argue that this relocation commits Erasmus to something more than friendship, crucial as that is to his sense of community as the foundation in turn of the best societies. Read in conjunction with the prolegomena, the first adage announces a special alignment between friendship as a social practice and the proverb as a discursive practice. In forging this alliance, I suggest, Erasmus advances his own literary agenda by pursuing three related aims: in the first place, he transfers to this peculiar literary form the esteem that regularly attaches to friendship in the ancient tradition handed down by the Adages; secondly, building on this transfer of esteem, he theorizes proverbial statement as the quintessential instrument of this tradition in particular and of traditionality more generally; and finally, as an almost inevitable consequence of this theory, he invites his readers to understand tradition itself, mutatis mutandis, as a complex, associative relation patterned after the ancient notion of friendship. Whereas in earlier works such as the Antibarbari he follows Augustine and Jerome in figuring the traditionary relationship in terms of one culture despoiling another—the so-called spoiliatum Aegyptorum—here he substitutes the association of friends for the appropriation of enemies.³

Not only moved between 1500 and 1508 but also substantially expanded, the first adage in the Aldine and subsequent Basel editions mentions several ancient authorities, among them Euripides, Terence, and Cicero. More important for my purposes, however, the revised adage features Plato and, even more so, Pythagoras. The Italian philosopher deserves special mention as the father not only of the adage but also of the way of life it engenders. As Erasmus writes at the end of the 1515 version of the adage,

Not only was Pythagoras the author of this saying, but he also instituted a kind of sharing of life and property in this way, the very thing Christ wants to happen among Christians. For all those who were admitted by Pythagoras into that well-known band who followed his instruction would give to the common fund whatever money and family property they possessed.⁴

If Pythagoras is worthy of mention for instituting a society founded on common property, Plato too deserves citation as the most passionate spokesman for such a society. Taking its cue from the Pythagoreans in imagining a community innocent of the words “mine” and “not mine,” Plato's philosophy of common ownership, says Erasmus, most nearly approximates Christ's own thinking on this issue.⁵

By placing this particular proverb at the head of more than 4000 proverbs and then by identifying it more specifically with Pythagoras and Plato, Erasmus signals the protreptic aim of the entire collection. Issuing a call for communitas in the radical sense, the Adages invites its readers to join a community where all things are held in common (commune) including material property and, more to the point, what we would call intellectual property. The Adages is, after all, a repository of the intellectual wealth of so-called classical antiquity collected in the interest of common use.⁶

Surely Pythagoras himself had in mind such an extended notion of common property, as Erasmus knew from the late antique tradition about his life and work, and especially about the pythagorae symbola, the so-called sayings of Pythagoras. Among others, Diogenes Laertius, whom Erasmus cites (LB, II, 14E), preserves not only a literary portrait of the Italian philosopher embracing as philoi—as friends—all those who took a share in his sayings but also the sayings themselves, which Erasmus, not incidentally, places in the revised Adages directly after the first adage on common property (LB, II, 14F-25E).⁷

Following Pythagoras, in other words, Erasmus endorses the commonality and even the community-building property of proverbial statement. Not least of the things that friends hold in common, proverbs belong to no individual member of a society or culture but to all alike. In the arena of discourse proverbs are the common stock. Indeed, Erasmus makes this one of the two preconditions of the form; it must be in common use, as his definition of paroemia in the introduction unambiguously affirms. A paroemia is celebre dictum (LB, II, 2B), or what he calls elsewhere sermo communis (LB, II, 2C), and its celebritas is encoded in its name. So Erasmus explains that “this is the origin of the word paroimia in Greek (from oimos, a road, as though well polished in use and circulating), that which travels everywhere on the lips of men, and of adagium in Latin, as if you should say ‘something passed around,’ following Varro” (LB, II, 2B; CWE, 31, 4-5). Lacking a single author, proverbs derive their authority from longstanding and general consensus. On this aspect of proverbial statement, Erasmus quotes Quintilian (LB, II, 7DE; CWE, 31, 16; cf. Institutio oratoria, 5.11.41-42): “Those things too which command general assent seem to be, as it were, common property from the very fact that they have no certain author.”

Both passed down and passed around, moreover, these tiny time-capsules of ancient wisdom prove more enduring than the most monumental works of culture, especially material culture: “So true is it,” Erasmus claims, “that what vanishes from written sources, what could not be preserved by inscriptions, colossal statues and marble tablets, is preserved intact in a proverb …” (LB, II, 7F; CWE, 31, 16-17). Not only outlasting the pyramids but also ranging freely across time and place, the proverb complements its antiquity with its adaptability. Erasmus begins the introduction by quoting the late antique grammarians Donatus and Diomedes on the proverb as a saying fitted or accommodated to things and times (accommodatum rebus temporibusque)(LB, II, 1B; CWE, 31, 30).

Protean in its ability to vary according to context, the proverb constitutes for Erasmus the consummate rhetorical instrument precisely because of its power to accommodate. So Erasmus explains how the proverb takes now one shape, now another, and how the rhetorician in control of his proverb “fits the same wording with multiple meanings” (idem dictum ad complureis sensus accommodes) (LB, II, 9E; CWE, 31, 20); or through irony, with contrary meanings (ad contrarias sententias)(LB, II, 9E; CWE, 31, 20); or again by changing a single word, with different meanings (diversis [sententiis]) (LB, II, 9F; CWE, 31, 20; cf. LB, II, 712A; CWE, 34, 174). Revered for its perdurability and permanence, then, the proverb is equally admired for its flexibility, its capacity for change. Indeed, the other precondition for proverbiality, alongside celebritas, is novitas or novelty. The proverb must be able not only to endure, but to change, and to change in such a way that surprises us by its newness (LB, II, 2AB; CWE, 31, 4).

At once common and unique, old and new, permanent and changing, the proverb functions like amicitia in a community to bind the many into one—the manifold into a single, common form: the discursive like the social unit. So Erasmus asks:

what else does love teach us except that all things should be common to all? In fact that united in friendship with Christ, glued to Him by the same binding force that holds Him fast to the Father, imitating so far as we may that complete communion by which He and the Father are one, we should also be one with Him, and, as Paul says, should become one spirit and one flesh with God, so that by the laws of friendship all that is His is shared with us and all that is ours is shared with Him; and then that, linked one to another in the same bonds of friendship, as members of one Head and like one and the same body we may be filled with the same spirit, and weep and rejoice at the same things together. This is signified to us by the mystic bread, brought together out of many grains into one flour, and the draught of wine fused into one liquid from many clusters of grapes. Finally, love teaches how, as the sum of all created things is God and God is in all things, the universal all is in fact one. You see what an ocean of philosophy, or rather of theology, is opened up to us by this tiny proverb.

(LB, II, 6F-7B; CWE, 31, 15)

Inviting us to marvel at the mystery of the Eucharist as koinōnia, the Greek term for both the ritual itself and the community it creates, Erasmus in the same breath invites us to marvel at the ocean of philosophy distilled in so small a drop of discourse.⁸

From these ancient distillations (LB, II, 7AB; CWE, 31, 15), Erasmus hypothesizes, come the philosophers' many volumes. As evidence of this hypothesis, he offers Plato's Gorgias and Republic, which, he says, “expound by so many arguments” the proverb preserved by Hesiod that “the half is more than the whole” (LB, II, 6DE; CWE, 31, 14; cf. I.ix.95; LB, II, 364C-366B; CWE, 32, 228-31). And what is true of the Hesiodic proverb is equally true of the Pythagorean proverb that inaugurates Erasmus's own volume. “[A]nyone who deeply and diligently considers that remark of Pythagoras ‘Between friends all is common’” Erasmus asserts in the introduction, “will certainly find the whole of human happiness included in this brief saying. What other purpose has Plato in so many volumes except to urge a community of living, and the factor which creates it, namely friendship?” (LB, II, 6EF; CWE, 31, 15).

However implausible this may sound to modern readers as a model of Plato's literary production, Erasmus is here suggesting that the philosopher produced his complex and manifold dialogues by amplifying or dilating—Erasmus might say giving copia to—a kernel of a more ancient proverbial wisdom. This suggestion is worth taking seriously, if not as a way to understand Plato, at least as a way to understand, on the one hand, how Erasmus understood Plato and, on the other, how Erasmus understood Plato to have understood Pythagoras, whose writings, Diogenes Laertius reports (8.15), the Athenian philosopher went to great pain and expense to obtain.

At stake in entertaining such a notion is a clearer picture not only of the complementary activities of literary production and literary reception—a complementarity that Erasmus theorized with clarity and sophistication⁹—but also of this complementarity in the formation of tradition, even in the idea of traditionality itself. For the notion of a literary tradition, like that of any other tradition, takes as its point of departure the legal handing over or down of property on the model of inheritance—the earliest arena of the Greek verb paradidōmi, from which paradosis, Greek counterpart of the Latin traditio and our own term tradition, comes.¹⁰ Erasmus's thinking about classical tradition, then, understood as the way that an ancient culture's literary production is received, reinvested with meaning, and passed on for further reception, is a thinking rooted in the notion of the ownership of property over time.

Without straying beyond the texts already under scrutiny, namely, the introduction and first adage, we can readily see that Erasmus considers the case of proverbial statement paradigmatic for assessing the mutuality between literary production and reception, between rhetoric and hermeneutics. Section 9 of the prolegomena, entitled ad intelligendos auctores conducere paroemiam (LB, II, 8D-9A; CWE, 31, 18), counsels readers on the difficulties of interpreting those authors who have used proverbs, while sections 10 and 11 counsel writers both on the difficulties of using proverbs effectively and on the rhetorical advantages that difficulty as a stylistic quality engendered by proverbs brings to their writing (LB, II, 9AD; CWE, 31, 19-20). To shed light on Erasmus's understanding of tradition, on the other hand, we need to look beyond the introduction and first adage, even beyond the Adages itself. Where to look, however, is only incompletely mapped by Erasmus as our guardian of the common intellectual stock.

Pinpointing the fifth book of Plato's Laws as one of several ancient citations of the originally Pythagorean saying that friends hold all things in common (LB, II, 14BC; CWE, 31, 29-30), the final version of the first adage somewhat curiously neglects to mention another Platonic citation that was better known to Erasmus's contemporaries and that arguably affords the adage a flashier setting. The Phaedrus, whose rich proverbial veins are mined elsewhere in the Adages for such gems as “the sweet elbow” (Phaedrus 257E; cf. II.i.38; LB, II, 419F-420E; CWE, 33, 37-39), “the shadow of an ass” (Phaedrus 260C; cf. I.iii.52; LB, II, 132C-133D; CWE, 31, 278-80) and “the garden of Adonis” (Phaedrus 276B; cf. I.i.4; LB, II, 26C-27B; CWE, 31, 51-53), ends with Socrates praying for integrity between the inner and outer man, an integrity he calls here a philia or friendship between his intellectual store and his material possessions—only such wealth, Socrates prays, as the self-possessed man, the sōphrōn, can handle (279C). Hoping for a full share in the prayer of his philos or friend, Phaedrus's amen takes the form of our adage: κοινὰ γὰρ τὰ τω̑ν ϕίλων, Phaedrus concludes; friends have all things, including their prayers, in common.

Unacknowledged in Erasmus's opening adage, in other words, the Phaedrus ends with the Pythagorean refrain of friendship and commonality, philia and koinōnia. Could this then be one of those Platonic volumes that Erasmus has in mind in the introductory passage cited earlier—one of those that urges “community of living, and the factor which creates it, namely friendship?” (LB, II, 6F; CWE, 31, 15). Although subtitled “Concerning the beautiful,” this dialogue does explore not only the relation between erōs and logos, erotic love and discourse, as students of Plato readily agree, but also erōs and philia, erotic love and friendship. And it does so in a distinctly Pythagorean way: so Pythagorean, in fact, that Ficino, whose Platonic commentaries Erasmus used, dates this dialogue as Plato's earliest.¹¹

While explicitly Pythagorean in its final prayer, however, the Phaedrus introduces its concern with friendship and commonality through the rhetorical competition between Lysias and Socrates. Responding to the urgings of his own friend, Socrates in his first speech challenges Lysias's oration on behalf of the nonlover without challenging its underlying assumption of the antagonism between friendship and love. If friends hold all things in common, lovers, by contrast, deprive their beloveds of property and even other friends in an effort to ensure their inferiority and continued dependence:

It is evident to everyone, and especially to a lover, that he would pray above all that his beloved be bereft of those who are for him the most friendly, most well-intentioned, and most divine, for a lover would welcome his beloved's being deprived of father and mother, relatives and friends, since he believes they will cause difficulties and raise objections to his most delightful relationship with his beloved. Moreover, he will believe that someone who has property, whether gold or other possessions, will not be as easily caught nor, when caught, as easily managed. As a result it is altogether inevitable that a lover will be jealous of the property that his darling possesses and rejoice at its loss.¹²

But if the lover of Socrates' first speech, the so-called left-handed lover, behaves in stark opposition to our first adage, the so-called right-handed lover of the palinode enacts the code of conduct proverbially endorsed. Not only does he not deprive the beloved of material property and social intercourse with other friends, but he himself grows neglectful of his own possessions and even of other people, so complete and sufficient is his association with the beloved—an association that Socrates characterizes most emphatically as philia or friendship. As Socrates insists:

For it is fated that bad is never to be a friend [ϕίλον] to bad nor good not to be a friend [ϕίλον] to good. When he has accepted the lover and enjoyed his conversation and his company, the goodwill of the lover that is revealed in their close relationship amazes the beloved, and he discovers that all his other friends and relatives offer no friendship [ϕιλίαs] at all in comparison with this friend who is divinely inspired.

(255B, p. 111)

Bound to one another through a profound likeness or similarity, lover and beloved find equality in a friendship that both surpasses any they have ever experienced and endures throughout their lives (255E, 256CE).

Concluding this dialogue with our Pythagorean symbolon or proverb and Erasmus's first adage, Plato also weaves other related proverbs into the fabric. Two of them, not incidentally, take their place in Erasmus's collection among the Pythagorae symbola immediately after our adage (I.i.2; LB, II, 14F-15C; CWE, 31, 31). They are amicitia aequalitas (τὴν ϕιλίαν ίsότητα ει̑ναι)—“friendship is equality”—and amicus alter ipse (τὸν ϕίλον ἤτερον αὐτόν)—“a friend is another self.” As we have already seen, the identification of friendship and equality cooperates with our adage to qualify the right association between lover and beloved in Socrates' recantatory second speech; amicus alter ipse, on the other hand, invites reflection not only on this right association but also on the relation between the two interlocutors—on their understanding of one another and on their understanding each of himself. For Socrates' outspokenly stated agenda as the two friends settle down to conversation outside the city's walls is self-knowledge.¹³

It is not just playfulness, then, but philosophical provocation when Socrates uncovers his friend's deception in pretending not to have learned Lysias's oration by heart with a variation of the proverbial amicus alter ipse. “Oh, Phaedrus! If I don't know Phaedrus,” Socrates chides, “I have forgotten myself” (228A, p. 88). Phaedrus, having already exposed his limited understanding of discourse through his misplaced admiration of Lysias's speech, soon exposes a comparably limited understanding of friendship, turning the Socratic version of the adage back on his companion: “[B]e careful,” Phaedrus mimics, “and don't deliberately force me to say ‘Socrates, if I don't know Socrates, I have forgotten myself’” (236C, p. 95). Phaedrus, in other words, is as complacent in the arena of friendship as in the arena of discourse, settling for imitation—that relation between copy and original routinely discredited throughout the dialogues—in place of profound similarity. Obviously about erōs and logos and arguably, as we have seen, about erōs and philia, the Phaedrus is also, I would suggest, about logos and philia, which are both, at their finest or most beautiful, grounded in commonality or koinōnia.

Indeed Socrates explicitly characterizes not only dialectical speaking and writing but thinking itself at its best as the ability to see the commonality in disparate things. Suffering, like everyone else, from love-sickness, Socrates confesses his peculiar erotic attachment not only to this process of searching out such commonalities but even to those who practice the search most philosophically; and not, we can infer, in order to imitate them, as Phaedrus aspires to imitate Lysias, but rather in order to become profoundly like them, in the deeper philosophical sense of sharing their company:

I, myself, Phaedrus, am a lover [ἐραsτήs] of these dividings and collectings as what enable me to speak and to think, and when I believe that someone else is able to see the natural unity and plurality of things, I follow him, “walking behind him in his footsteps as in those of a god.” Moreover, up to now, I've called those who're able to do this dialecticians, though whether I address them correctly or not only a god knows.

(266BC, p. 123)

Socrates, then, encourages Plato's readers along with Phaedrus to imagine a discursive praxis homologous to a social praxis rooted in commonality. And if friendship is the paradigmatic social form of this koinōnia, the proverb is its paradigmatic discursive form, justifying not only the many proverbs that animate this dialogue, including the Homeric tag in the passage just quoted, but also and especially the closing proverb. For the Pythagorean adage that “friends hold all things in common” in the context of the end of the Phaedrus turns out to have new and perhaps even surprisingly novel consequences not only for our understanding of logos and philia but also for our understanding of koinōnia as their common foundation. Having carefully and successfully invested his Pythagorean inheritance—or so Erasmus might argue—Plato passes on the common fund significantly enriched.

If Erasmus reads the Phaedrus as one of those volumes that amplify a more ancient bit of proverbial wisdom, he writes at least one of his own dialogues, the Convivium Religiosum—the so-called “Godly Feast”—in much the same way. Erasmian production, once again, parallels Erasmian reception; rhetorical strategies complement those of hermeneutics. Indeed the opening words of this most well-known of the colloquies establish at once its intention to stake a claim on the common intellectual fund regarding the relation between logos and philia, discourse and friendship:

EUSEBIUS:
Now that the whole countryside is fresh and smiling, I marvel at people who take pleasure in smoky cities.
TIMOTHY:
Some people don't enjoy the sight of flowers or verdant meadows or fountains or streams; or if they do, something else pleases them more. Thus pleasure succeeds pleasure, as nail drives out nail.
EUSEB.:
Maybe you refer to moneylenders or to greedy merchants, who are just like them.
TIM.:
Those, yes, but not those alone, my good friend. No, countless others besides them, including the very priests and monks themselves, who for the sake of gain usually prefer to live in cities—the most populous cities. They follow not Pythagorean or Platonic doctrine but that of a certain blind beggar who rejoiced in the jostling of a crowd because, he would say, where there were people there was profit.
EUSEB.:
Away with the blind and their profit! We're philosophers.
TIM.:
Also the philosopher Socrates preferred cities to fields, because he was eager to learn and cities afforded him means of learning. In the fields, to be sure, were trees and gardens, fountains and streams, to please the eye; but they had nothing to say and therefore taught nothing.
EUSEB.:
Socrates was not altogether wrong if you mean roaming in the fields by yourself. In my opinion, however, Nature is not silent but speaks to us everywhere and teaches the observant man many things if she finds him attentive and receptive. What else does the charming countenance of blooming Nature proclaim than that God the Creator's wisdom is equal to his goodness?—But how many things Socrates teaches his Phaedrus in that retreat, and how many does he learn from him in turn!(14)

Reinvesting not only the setting of the Phaedrus but also its reliance throughout on proverbs—here introduced by the adage “nail drives out nail” (I.ii.4; LB, II, 70BE; CWE, 31, 148-49)—Erasmus soon settles on the proverb key to this colloquy as a whole. Without explicitly mentioning the first adage, he has Timotheus contrast this dogma Pythagoricum aut Platonicum (LB, I, 671C) that friends hold all things in common with the dogma of a certain blind beggar: ubi populus, illic quaestum; “where there's people, there's profit.”

Inverting the stated preference of the present company for the quiet of the country over the hubbub of the city, this competing dogma not incidentally perverts another, related adage: ubi amici, ibi opes; “where there's friends, there's wealth” (I.iii.24; LB, II, 121F-122A; CWE, 31, 256; cf. Quintilian, 5.11.41 and the prolegomena, LB, II, 7E). While both of these proverbially stated dogmas are rooted in the Pythagorean tradition of linking the organization of society to the distribution of wealth or property, the one values material wealth only as it enhances human companionship, and the other values human companionship only as it increases material wealth. And Eusebius's invitation to Timotheus and their other friends to lunch at his suburban villa serves to test the limits of the doctrine or dogma attributed to Pythagoras and Plato.

For Eusebius's home, by his own account, is a place, like Plato's ideal community as epitomized in the first adage, innocent of the words “mine” and “not mine.” The host not only considers the produce of his estate pene publicum, practically common property (LB, I, 673B; Thompson, 49), but he insists that his guests in turn consider his house their own (LB, I, 676E): tota domus haec mea est, simulque vestra—“what's mine is yours” (Thompson, 56). And he repeats this same communitarian principle at the dialogue's close as he leaves these friends in order to help others more in need. Indeed, he politely corrects Timotheus's mistaken assumption that it is business rather than friendship that calls their host away. “I wouldn't leave such friends,” Eusebius assures him, “for the sake of money.”¹⁵

A place where amicitia prevails, Eusebius's house is also custom-made for discourse. Characterized as loquacissima rather than opulenta (LB, I, 674A; Thompson, 51)—not luxurious but full of talk—it invites its visitors to sample gardens and walkways where every detail has something to say, sometimes trilingually in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and often in proverbs. As we might expect, many of these proverbs also appear in the Adages; The Book of Proverbs supplies the rest. So, for example, the host draws his guests' attention to a decorative mural featuring a painted camel dancing (LB, I, 675B; Thompson, 53) while a beetle vainly protests an eagle devouring a hare (LB, I, 675A; Thompson, 53). Even the walls and cups, as Timotheus notices (LB, I, 680C; Thompson, 62), talk proverbial sense.¹⁶ Here, Eusebius informs his company, he spends his leisure either in solitary reflection or, recalling our amicus alter ipse, in conversation with a dear friend (LB, I, 674D; Thompson, 52). And so the colloquy as a whole represents a wholesome conversation among friends, one that progresses towards a conformity with the meal that it accompanies.

This highly structured coincidence between eating and talking, I would suggest, marks the peculiarly Erasmian investment of the common intellectual fund he inherits.¹⁷ In fact, Erasmus invests the meal itself, the convivium, with the accumulated wealth of two traditions: the so-called classical and the Christian. Enforcing the obvious analogy between physical and spiritual nourishment, Eusebius insists on the sanctity of the common meal for the ethnici as for the Christiani. “For truly if a meal was something holy to pagans,” he reasons, “much more should it be so to Christians, for whom it is an allegory [imaginem] of that sacred last supper [sacrosancti convivii] which the Lord Jesus took with his disciples” (LB, I, 676C; Thompson, 55). So hallowed an occasion did Jesus hold the common meal, Eusebius continues, that he exalted it at the beginning and end with hymning (LB, I, 676CD). The imago of this sacrosanctum convivium—this most sacred meal—as we have already seen in the first adage, the earliest Christians called koinōnia, the Greek term for community itself.

It is even possible, Erasmus speculates in at least two other adages, that the episodes of sacred history involving a meal reinvest an old Pythagorean custom with new meaning. So he records among the Pythagorae symbola the proverb panem ne frangito (I.i.2; LB, II, 23D; CWE, 31, 46)—“Do not break bread”—commenting that by distributing bread Christ consecrated a perpetual friendship, an amicitia perpetua, among his followers; and so he explains in a later adage (I.vi.10; LB, II, 225C; CWE, 32, 10) also associated with Pythagoras—salem et mensam ne praeteream; “transgress not salt and trencher”—not only the significance of the common meal to the iura amicitiae, the laws of friendship, but also the dangers of breaking these laws:¹⁸

In the old days eating salt with a man and sharing his tables cemented a friendship, and in Antiquity friends often used to dine together. So Diogenes Laertius also testifies in his life of Pythagoras. … [Origen] turns this also against Judas who betrayed Christ. Again in his commentary on Matthew he says of Judas “Nor did he bethink him of the bread and salt that they had eaten together.” And it may well be that Christ himself, founder of our religion, alluded to this, as it seems to have been his policy to hide his deepest mysteries in the very commonest things of daily life, for he knew that this emblem would be despised by the Jews and welcomed by the Gentiles.

(LB, II, 225C; CWE, 32, 10)

Even before Origen, then, who is arguably the most hellenized of the early Fathers, Christ himself, Erasmus suggests, brought the gentiles into his amicitia perpetua by appropriating pagan, perhaps Pythagorean, traditions, and especially that of the convivium or common meal.

Associating itself from its opening words with the Phaedrus, the Convivium Religiosum effectively stakes a claim to the commonality forged by the Platonic dialogue between discourse and friendship. Like the relation of the Phaedrus to its Pythagorean inheritance, the Erasmian colloquy reinvests that commonality with new meaning, in this case through its peculiarly Christian investment in koinōnia as the ritual meal that enforces the amicitia between Christ and his followers. This reinvestment, as we have seen, animates not only this colloquy but also a number of adages, including the first. In effecting this reinvestment, furthermore, Erasmus also enforces the amicitia or friendship between the pagan and Christian traditions. Most memorably and famously summarized by the friend of Eusebius named Nephalius in his pious ejaculation, “Saint Socrates, pray for us” (Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis) (LB, I, 683E; Thompson, 68), this commonality—this friendship—between so-called classical and Christian culture occupies no small part of the conversation between Eusebius and his friends; so, in turn, it occupies no small part of Erasmus's agenda throughout his literary works, especially the Colloquies and Adages.

To recognize with Eusebius and his friends a koinōnia between Socrates or Cato and Paul, in other words, is at the least to entertain the possibility of one between Pythagoras or Plato and Erasmus. Tradition in this tradition looks like the common fund belonging equally to all those who, like the first Pythagorean initiates at Croton, joined an association of like-minded friends. Committed to conversation and common meals, these friends were also committed to administering their shared wealth with an eye to enriching the intellectual store for both present and future associates. Among the many things that such friends hold in common, then, is a common understanding of the application of their founding proverb to the continued prosperity of their traditions.

Notes

1. For the letters of Erasmus, see P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W. Garrod (eds.), Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami (11 vols.; Oxford, 1906-47). Following the Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto, 1974-), hereafter CWE, I refer to letter number only from the Allen edition. For the Latin text of the prolegomena, Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, ed. J. LeClerc (Leiden, 1703), II, hereafter LB, and for the English, CWE, 31, 3-28. See also Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (Amsterdam, 1993), II (I), 45-83. In general see Margaret Mann Phillips, The “Adages” of Erasmus (Cambridge, 1964), esp. Part I, “The Character and Growth of the Adages,” 3-165.

2. Phillips, The “Adages” of Erasmus, 12-13, 111-12; also T. C. Appelt, Studies in the Contents and Sources of Erasmus' “Adagia” (Chicago, 1942), 43-44; Daniel Kinney, “Erasmus' Adagia: Midwife to the Rebirth of Learning,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 11 (1981), 169-92; Margaret Mann Phillips, “Ways with Adages,” Essays on the Works of Erasmus, ed. Richard L. DeMolen (New Haven, 1978), 51-60, and “Comment s'est-on servi des Adages?,” in Actes du Colloque International Erasme, ed. Jacques Chomarat, André Godin, and Jean-Claude Margolin (Geneva, 1990), 325-36; John C. Olin, “Erasmus' Adagia and More's Utopia,” in Miscellanea Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc'hadour, ed. Clare M. Murphy, Henry Gibaud, and Mario A. DiCesare (Binghamton, N.Y., 1989), 127-36.

3. On Erasmus's use of the spoiliatum Aegyptorum see Antibarbari, LB, X, 1732B-1733A; CWE, 23, 97-98; also Charles Béné, Erasme et Saint Augustin (Geneva, 1969), 59-95 and my “Intellectual Property and the Adages of Erasmus: Coenobium v. Ercto non cito,” in Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, ed. Lorna Hutson and Victoria Kahn (New Haven, Conn., forthcoming).

4. LB, II, 14F; CWE, 31, 30. See C. J. De Vogel, Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism (Assen, 1966); and my “Koinōnia and the Friendship between Rhetoric and Religion,” in Rhetoric and Religion in our Time, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (New Haven, forthcoming). For Budé on this same homology between Christianity and Pythagoreanism see his letter to Thomas Lupset appended to the 1518 Utopia in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter (15 vols.; New Haven, 1965), IV, 9-10: “This happens, of course, in those generations, those institutions, those customs, in those nations which have pronounced it lawful that every man should have reputation and power in proportion to the resources by which he has built up his own family fortunes—he and his heirs. This process snowballs as great-great-great-grandchildren and their great-great-grandchildren vie in increasing by splendid additions the patrimonies received from their forefathers—which amounts to saying that it snowballs as they oust, far and wide, their neighbors, their kindred by marriage, their relations by blood, and even their brothers and sisters. Yet Christ, the founder and supervisor of possessions [possessionum conditor & moderator], let among His followers a Pythagorean communion and charity [Pythagoricam communionem & charitatem] ratified by significant example when Ananias was condemned to death for breaking the law of communion [communionis legem]. Certainly, by this arrangement, Christ seems to me to have abolished, among His own at least, the whole arrangement set up by the civil and canonical law of fairly recent date in contentious volumes. This law we see today holding the highest position in jurisprudence and controlling our destinies.” For Budé on friends holding all things in common see his letter to Erasmus (November, 1516), Ep. 493, CWE, 4, 151: “Consequently I now propose to form a partnership with you, if you concur, in all our friends, the more readily as you have already acquired a title not only to my friends but to myself, so that from now on there is a legal agreement between us for friendship of no ordinary kind expressed in these words in all good faith; and let us enter into this covenant on the understanding that we shall hold all our possessions in common and shall share our friends.”

5. LB, II, 6F-7A; CWE, 31, 15. Plato gives the fullest treatment of this principle of community in the Republic. For Aristotle's objections see Politics, 2.1, 1261a1-2.5, 1264b25, and esp. 2.3, 1261b16-20 (The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes [2 vols.; Princeton, 1984], II, 2002): “But, even supposing that it were best for the community to have the greatest degree of unity, this unity is by no means proved to follow from the fact of all men saying ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’ at the same instant of time, which, according to Socrates, is the sign of perfect unity in a state.” In Dulce bellum inexpertis (1515), Erasmus identifies the distinction between Christian and Aristotelian philosophy on the issue of property (tr. Phillips, 331): “For if Christ has said anything which is not easily fitted to our way of life, it is permitted to interpret it differently; but anyone who dares to oppose the oracular pronouncements of Aristotle is immediately hooted off the stage. From him we have learnt that human felicity cannot be complete without worldly goods—physical or financial. From him we have learnt that a state cannot flourish where all things are held in common. We try to combine all his doctrines with the teaching of Christ, which is like mixing water and fire.” For the similar incompatibility between Christianity and Roman law see Phillips, 331; on the other hand, for the compatibility of Christian with Pythagorean philosophy according to this adage, see Phillips, 318 and 320, and cf. 111-12.

6. For the impact of developing intellectual property law, especially copyright, on the publication history of the Adages, see my “Intellectual Property and the Adages of Erasmus.”

7. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, tr. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, Mass., 1925; rpt. 1979), II, 8.1-50; on the Pythagorae symbola see 8.16-17; Aulus Gellius, The Attic Nights, tr. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., 1927; rpt. 1984), 1.9; Plutarch, Moralia, tr. F. C. Babbitt (Cambridge, Mass., 1927; rpt. 1969), I, 12DF and Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Life, tr. Gillian Clark (Liverpool, 1989). And see S. K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, Calif., 1974), 19-68.

8. See my “Koinōnia and the Friendship between Rhetoric and Religion.”

9. See my Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and its Humanist Reception (New Haven, Conn., 1997), 64-78.

10. On this complex issue, see, for instance, Gerald L. Bruns, “What is Tradition?” New Literary History, 22 (1991), 1-21; Gerhard Ebeling, The Word of God and Tradition, tr. S. H. Hooke (London, 1968), 144-47; R. P. C. Hanson, Origen's Doctrine of Tradition (London, 1954), esp. ch. 1, “The Meaning of Tradition,” 31-39; Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” The Monist, 60 (1977), 453-72.

11. On the multiple themes of the Phaedrus and their interrelation, see G. R. F. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato's “Phaedrus” (Cambridge, 1987) and Charles L. Griswold, Self-Knowledge in Plato's “Phaedrus” (New Haven, Conn., 1986). For Erasmus's use of Ficino see Maria Cytowska, “Erasme de Rotterdame et Marsile Ficin son Maître,” Eos, 63 (1975), 165-79. For Ficino on the Phaedrus, including its early dating and Pythagoreanism, see Michael J. B. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino: A Study of his “Phaedrus” Commentary, Its Sources and Genesis (Berkeley, 1984) and Marsilio Ficino and the Phaedrian Charioteer (Berkeley, 1981), 7-14, esp. 13-14: “The Phaedrus, being first, was more closely tied to the pre-Platonic past than were later dialogues; hence Ficino's comment on the description of the soul's loss of flight and its descent through nine degrees: ‘Throughout [Socrates/Plato] uses poetic license and describes Pythagorean notions rather than his own.’ Briefly, these Pythagorean notions were centered around the doctrines of reincarnation and transmigration, but the point to be stressed is that Ficino saw Plato resorting to ‘poetic license’ in order to articulate the wisdom he had inherited (and he treasured the legend that had Plato wandering the length of the Mediterranean world in search of youthful enlightenment until he chose the Pythagorean way as closest to the truth; Aristotle had claimed, by contrast, and with number ontology principally in mind, that the Pythagoreans had influenced Plato only in later life).” For Cicero on Plato's Pythagoreanism, see De re publica, I. 10. 16.

12. 239E-240A. Plato's Erotic Dialogues, tr. with commentary William S. Cobb (Albany, 1993), 98. All translations of the Phaedrus are from this edition.

13. See Griswold, Self-Knowledge in Plato's “Phaedrus.”

14. LB, I, 672CE; The Colloquies of Erasmus, tr. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago, 1965), 48.

15. LB, I, 689D; Thompson, 78. For a somewhat differently oriented but not incompatible reading of these same details see Dennis Costa, “Domesticating the Divine Economy: Humanist Theology in Erasmus's Convivia,” Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman III, and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Binghamton, 1992), 11-29.

16. For camela saltat or “the camel dances” see II.vii.66; LB, II, 630A; CWE, 34, 33. For scarabeus aquilam quaerit or “the beetle searches for the eagle” see III.vii.1; LB, II, 869A-883E. For only a few other examples of the many adages in this colloquy, see, for instance, optimum condimentum fames or “hunger is the best sauce” (II. vii. 69; LB, II, 630D-631A; CWE, 34, 34; LB, I, 672F; Thompson, 49), oderint, dum metuant or “let them hate, so long as they fear” (II. ix. 62; LB, II, 676DF; CWE, 34, 113; LB, I, 675D; Thompson, 54) and rem acu tetigisti or “you have touched the issue with a needle-point” (II.iv.93; LB, II, 550D; CWE, 33, 235; LB, I, 678EF; Thompson, 60). It is also worth noting that the first passage singled out for exegesis is Proverbs 21:1-3 (LB, I, 677BC; Thompson, 57), a vellum copy of which constitutes one of the gifts given from host to guest at the end of the meal (LB, I, 687EF; Thompson, 75). On both the role of adages in this colloquy and the role of convivia or banquets in the adages, see Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et Rhétorique chez Erasme (Paris, 1981), 777.

17. The coincidence itself is of course already traditional. For the analogy between logos and deipnos, see Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae (tr. Charles Burton Gulick [Cambridge, Mass., 1927; 7 vols.]), 1.1: “In short, the plan [οίκονομία] of the discourse reflects the rich bounty [πολυτελείαs] of a feast, and the arrangement of the book the courses of the dinner.” For Erasmus's own account of his use of Athenaeus in compiling the Adages, see festina lente, LB, II, 405D and CWE, 33, 14. For the career of Marcus Musurus, who helped Erasmus on the Adages, as chief editor of the Aldine press during this time, see Deno John Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice: Studies in the Dissemination of Greek Learning from Byzantium to Western Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 111-66. For the Sybarite protection of intellectual property as recorded in Athenaeus, see 12.521, and note the traditional enmity between Sybaris and its neighbor, Croton. For Croton as a center of health and well-being (in contrast to Sybarite luxury) see II.iv.43 and II.iv.44, LB, II, 536C-537D; CWE, 33, 211-13.

18. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 8.3, 1156b25-30.