#2: Erasmus, Praise of Folly
Analyze the tone of this excerpt from Erasmus' In Praise of Folly and discuss the techniques Erasmus uses to achieve this tone.
But it would be very foolish of me and certainly call for some of Democritus' outbursts of laughter if I tried to enumerate all the types of folly and madness among the people. Let's look at those who have some reputation for wisdom amongst mortals and seek the golden bough, as the saying goes.
Among them the schoolmasters hold first place. They would surely be the most unfortunate and wretched class of men and the one most hateful to the gods if I didn't mitigate the hardships of their miserable profession by a pleasant-kind of madness. For they're exposed not merely to the 'five curses', that is, the five calamities mentioned in the Greek epigram, but to six hundred, always famished and dirty as they are amidst their hordes of boys in their schools; though what I call schools should rather be their 'thinking-shop', or better still, their treadmill and torture chamber. There they grow old with toil and deaf with the clamour, wasting away in the stench and filth. Yet, thanks to me, in their own eyes they are first among men, and enjoy considerable satisfaction when they terrify the trembling crowd with threatening voice and looks, thrashing their wretched pupils with cane, birch, and strap, venting their fury in any way they please like the famous ass of Cumae. Meanwhile the squalor they live in is sheer elegance to them, the stink smells sweet as marjoram, and their pitiful servitude seems like sovereignty, so that they wouldn't change their tyranny for all the power of Phalaris or Dionysius.*
Yet they get even more happiness out of their remarkable belief in their own learning. There they are, most of them filling boys' heads with arrant nonsense, but setting themselves above any Palaemon or Donatus! And by some sort of confidence-trick they do remarkably well at persuading foolish mothers and ignorant fathers to accept them at their own valuation. Then there's this further type of pleasure. Whenever one of them digs out of some mouldy manuscript the name of Anchises' mother or some trivial word the ordinary man doesn't know, such as neatherd, tergiversator, cutpurse, or if anyone unearths a scrap of old stone with a fragmentary inscription, 0 Jupiter, what a triumph! What rejoicing, what eulogies! They might have conquered Africa or captured Babylon.** And again, when they keep on bringing out their feeble verses, their own hopeless efforts,and find no lack of admirers, of course they believe the spirit of Virgil is reborn in themselves. But the funniest thing of all is when there's an exchange of compliments and appreciation, a mutual back-scratching. Yet if someone else slips up on a single word and his sharper-eyed fellow happens to pounce on it, 'Hercules', what dramas, what fights to the death, accusations, and abuse! The whole world of grammarians may turn on me if I lie.
'I know one 'jack-of-all-trades', scholar of Greek and Latin, mathematician, philosopher, doctor, all in princely style, a man already in his sixties, who has thrown up everything else and spent twenty years vexing and tormenting himself over grammar. He supposes he'd be perfectly happy if he were allowed to live long enough to define precisely how the eight parts of speech should be distinguished, something in which no one writing in Greek or Latin has ever managed to be entirely successful. And then if anyone treats a conjunction as a word with the force of an adverb, it's a thing to go to war about. To this end, though there are as many grammars as grammarians - or rather, more, since my friend Aldus*** alone has brought out more than five - there isn't one, however ignorantly or tediously written, which our man will pass over without scrutinizing it from cover to cover. Nor is there anyone, however inept his efforts in this field, who won't arouse his jealousy, for he's pitiably afraid that someone will win the prize before him, and that all his labours of so many years will be wasted. Would you rather call this madness or folly? It doesn't really make much difference to me, as long as you admit that it's entirely due to me that a creature who'd otherwise be quite the most unfortunate can be carried away to such a pitch of happiness that he wouldn't want to change places with the kings of Persia.
Poets aren't so much in my debt, though they're admittedly members of my party, as they're a free race, as the saying goes, whose sole interest lies in delighting the ears of the foolish with pure nonsense and silly tales. Yet strange to say, they rely on these for the immortality and godlike life they assure themselves and they make similar promises to others. 'Self-love and Flattery ' are their special friends, and no other race of men worships me with such wholehearted devotion.
Then there are the rhetoricians; they may side with the philosophers and not want to commit themselves, but they too really belong to me - witness the fact, amongst others, that the trivialities they've written about include so many painstaking passages on the theory of joking. And so whoever it was who dedicated his Art of Rhetoric to Herennius lists folly amongst the types of witticism, while Quintilian, the prince of orators by a long way, has a chapter on laughter which is even longer than the Iliad. They pay high tribute to folly in believing that what can't be refuted by argument can often be parried by laughter; unless anyone supposes that raising a laugh by witticisms according to plan has nothing to do with folly.****
Footnotes:
* In late antiquity, Democritus was known as 'the laughing philosopher' on account of his attitude to the folly of the world. The 'five curses' are enumerated in an epigram of Palladas, listing the misfortunes alluded to in the first five lines of the Iliad, a text to which of course a11 'grammarians' were exposed. The ass of Cumae probably refers to Aesop's ass in the lion's skin (which figurcs in the Adages). Dionysius was a famous tyrant of Syracuse. Folly's description of schoolmasters owes something to Juvenal's seventh satire and takes up a traditional butt of satirical attack. The grammarians or schoolmasters whom Folly treats so harshly were also elsewhere attacked by Erasmus, who believed in an educational system that was humane as well as humanist. He abhorred the harsh discipline and physical discomfort of the Parisian colleges, and especially the College de Montaigu under the reforming Standonck which he had attended in 1495-6. He was later to lampoon Montaigu in the colloquy On the Eating of Fish in 1526, by which time it had become the focal point of the scholastic opposition to evangelical humanism. Back**Palaemon was the first Roman grammarian to write a fully comprehcnsive grammatical treatise. He was known also for his arrogance and notorious morals, and lived under Tiberius and Claudius. Donatus lived in the fourth century AD and taught St Jerome. His grammar was the standard textbook throughout the middle ages. In his seventh satire juvenal mentions the 'nameof Anchises' nurse' as an instance of the unknowable things grammarians quarrel about. The conquest of Africa and the capture of Babylon were proverbial expressions for the achievementof the impossible. Back
***The passage about the 'jack-of-all-trades' was inserted in 1516 and refers to Thomas Linacre (c. 1460-1524)), who was a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, from 1484, and from 1487 to 1499 was in Italy, where he studied Greek and medicine. He became tutor to Prince Arthur and in 1509 doctor to Henry VIII.
Aldus Manucius, the famous humanist and printer, opened his press at Venice in 1485. Linacre was among those who helped him. By 1500 his house had become the centre of a small academy of Greek scholars, and the famous Roman small typeface, said to be copied from the hand of Petrarch, was known to humanists throughout Europe. Erasmus came to call in 1507 and stayed to see the Adages through the Aldine press in 1508. He writes of Aldus in the 1508 adage Festina lente and again, waspishly defending himself against attack after Aldus's death, in the 1531 colloquy Opulentia Sordida. Alberto Pio, a pupil of Aldus who from 1525 was convinced that Erasmus was a Lutheran in disguise, felt it necessary to defend Aldus against what he erroneously took to be an attack on him in this passage on grammarians. Erasmus's reply makes it clear chat no offence was intended or could reasonably be taken, but his reminiscences of Venice in the colloquy were coloured by his need to defend himself against accusations that he had acted as a paid proofreader for Aldus and risen drunk from his table. In 1513 Erasmus had published a book on the right parts of speech. Back
****That 'poets are a free race' is a proverb quoted by Lucian and used in the Adages. The theme of poetic immortality touched on by Folly is a commonplace associated especially with Horace. The popular rhetorical handbook Ad Herennium was once thought to be by Cicero, but this attribution was questioned from the fifteenth century. The reference to Folly is in I, 6, 1. Quintilian deals with laughter in a famous chapter (book 6, chapter 3) of the Institutio oratoria which he published towards the end of the first century AD. Back
Top of page