Des Apophtegmes a la Polyanthee: Erasme et le Genre Des Dits Memorables
Bibliographic record
Abstract
* Des Apophtegmes a la Polyanthee: Erasme et le genre des dits memorables. By Louis Lobbes. 3 vols. Textes litteraires de la Renaissance, 12. Paris: Editions Champion, 2013. 2000 pp. 295 euros. Opera omnia IV-4: Apophthegmatum libri I-IV. By Desiderius Erasmus. Edited by Tineke L. ter Meer. London and Boston: Brill, 2010. viii + 399 pp. $142.00. The Apophthegmata, a collection of shrewd and witty sayings made by particular ancient men and women, and gathered classic texts, appeared late in Erasmus's career. The first edition (Apophthegmatum ... dictorum libri sex) came press of Hieronymus Froben in 1531. It was dedicated to young William of Cleves (1516-1592) and was meant to instruct him, and other noblemen like him, in wise speech of leadership, using exempla antiquity. An expanded edition (now eight books) appeared a year later. A final and corrected text (Apophthegmatum libri octo ... denuo vigilanter ab ipso recogniti autore) was published in 1535 (Erasmus died following year). The collection was immensely popular, going through dozens of editions into seventeenth century. The first translation was in German, prepared by Heinrich von Eppendorff, an enemy who suppressed Erasmus's name on title page, and as early as 1549 work had also been translated into French, English, Spanish, and Italian. When Thomas Nashe, in his Anatomie of Absurditie (1588), describes way that Agesilaus of Sparta refused food and drink in country of Thasius (or Thasos), he probably picked story up widely circulated Apophthegmata, not directly Plutarch. The two books under review are both scholarly editions of this text. The work of Dr. ter Meer is an annotated text of Books I through IV, first of two volumes in authoritative ASD edition of Erasmus Opera omnia (ASD is an abbreviated name for Amsterdam, where project started). The study by Dr. Lobbes (a substantial Habilitation a diriger des recherches directed by Jean Ceard) is made up of a volume of introduction and source notes for each apophthegm, followed by two volumes that print 1535 Latin text opposite two French translations of 1539 and 1553. To these two might now be joined volumes 37 and 38 of Collected Works of Erasmus, a translation of Apophthegmata by Drs. Betty Knott and Elaine Fantham that has appeared at time of writing (September 2014) University of Toronto Press. Despite its considerable humour and many flashes of insight, along with always engaging presence of Erasmus throughout text, once widely circulated Apophthegmata is not that well known today. Essentially a book of political wisdom for young William and his fellow peers, it is a remarkable treasure-house of 3,085 quotations or observations by or about many ancient notables, taken and often significantly modified Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, Xenophon, Athenaeus, and many other writers. Plutarch's Apophthegmata Laconica and Dicta regum et imperatorum in Morada were initial inspiration, but Erasmus shook apart Plutarch and a large body of other sources to reform them into a new whole. There are eight books with sayings Spartans, Socrates, Aristippus, Diogenes Cynic, other great men of war and politics (Cicero and Demosthenes tacked in at end of IV), and miscellaneous persons, such as Roman historical figures gathered Suetonius, Livy, Valerius Maximus, and Historia Augusta. Books VII and VIII, the after dinner sweets (as Erasmus puts it), were added in second edition. Book VII has philosophers as its theme and is based largely on Diogenes Laertius; Book VIII turns to sophists (moving from horses to asses, says Erasmus). A typical short entry comes Plutarch's account of Agesilaus: [30] in ASD: Rursus alii cuidam percontanti, quam ob causam Sparta non cingeretur moenibus, ostendit ciues armatos. 'Hi' inquiens 'sunt Spartanae ciuitatis moenia,' significans respublicas nullo munimento tutiores esse quam virtute ciuium. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".