SOURCE: Eden, Kathy. “‘Between Friends All is Common’: The Erasmian Adage and Tradition.” Journal of the History of Ideas 59, no. 3 (July 1998): 405-19.

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...