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384 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 the republic and its governing elites.= The work=s dense philosophical and political orchestrations may account for the complexity of Ficino=s style, which on one hand conceptualizes sublimity, after Plotinus, >in an unadorned and apparently artless way= at the same time as it is >rhetorically challenging, with its frequent asyndeton (making the reader work it out), its unbalanced periods (drawing the reader into the mazes of the argument) ... and its intermittent flights of poetic imagery contributing to a sense of allocutionary trance.= Modelled after the Harvard Loeb Classical Library series, the I Tatti translations are in dual-language format (with the Latin text on the left page and the translation on the right), facilitating comparison. Michael Allen=s translation of the Ficino volume is careful and meticulous, as is the editorial apparatus. In addition to the critical introduction, the volume includes two sets of explanatory notes (to the text and to the translation respectively), a selected bibliography of secondary sources, and a valuable author and subject index. The volume promises to become indispensable to Renaissance scholarship in general. (VIVIANA COMENSOLI) William Barker, editor. The Adages of Erasmus University of Toronto Press. lii, 406. $80.00, $29.95 Erasmus=s Adages, surveyed in this new selection by William Barker, is one of the great achievements of Renaissance humanism. A work of astonishing erudition, which recurrently occupied its author for thirty-six years, it was originally intended only as a rhetorical handbook: classical proverbs were then still regarded both as sources of authority and as ornaments of style. The first edition (1500) included 818 Latin and Greek proverbs, each accompanied by a few lines of commentary citing passages in which the proverb figures and explaining its meaning and application. In the nine subsequent editions, the collection was enormously expanded. The second edition (1508) already included 3260 proverbs; the tenth B published in 1536, the year of Erasmus=s death B included 4151. As the number of proverbs expanded, so did the purposes of the book. While the great majority of the commentaries remained quite brief, selected ones grew into substantial essays on the moral, social, and political themes that were the central concerns of all of Erasmus=s work; the best-known of these is the commentary on Dulce bellum inexpertis (>War is sweet for those who have not tried it=), at 11,000 words the longest of the essays, and a major anti-war statement. The basic strategy of the book is that of Renaissance humanism in general: to bring a detailed understanding of the classical past to bear on xxxxxxx humanities 385 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 the letters and life of the present. Thus in the commentary on Aut regem aut fatuum nasci oportere (>One ought to be born a king or a fool=), Erasmus provides a dense survey (twenty-two examples ranging from Jove to Heliogabulus) of the follies of antique rulers mortal and divine, and employs this material as the context and occasion for impassioned reflections on how modern-day rulers ought to be educated so as to avoid these follies and their stupendous consequences for the ruled. The book was enormously popular, both as rhetorical manual and as social commentary. The scope of its influence is perhaps clearest in the impact of a few of Erasmus=s errors: as Barker notes, we speak of >Pandora=s box= only because Erasmus mistranslated the Greek >pithos= (>jar=) into Latin >pyxis= (>box=). But the sheer size of the collection was always a barrier to its full use. Erasmus himself recognized this problem, and encouraged the shortened versions that soon began to appear. In subsequent centuries, though the uses and the audience for the Adages have shrunk, its remaining readers= need for epitomes has not diminished, while the need for vernacular translations of Erasmus=s Latin has vastly increased. English readers are on the verge of having a full text of the Adages in seven volumes of the Toronto edition of the Collected Works; and now Barker has supplied a new epitome, drawn from these volumes (including...

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