Adagia

Adagia (adagium is the singular form and adagia is the plural) is an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus' collection of proverbs is "one of the most monumental ... ever assembled" (Speroni, 1964, p. 1).

The first edition, titled Collectanea Adagiorum, was published in Paris in 1500, in a slim quarto of around eight hundred proverbs. By 1508, after his stay in Italy, Erasmus had expanded the collection (now called Adagiorum chiliades or "Thousands of proverbs") to over three thousand items, many accompanied by richly annotated commentaries, some of which were brief essays on political and moral topics. The work, which continued to be expanded right up to his death in 1536 (to a final total of 4,151 essays), is the fruit of Erasmus' vast reading in ancient literature.