Nemo bene imperat, nisi qui paruerit imperio
No one is a good commander who has not been under command.[Sentence in Greek omitted] It is impossible for one to rule well, who has not been ruled himself. This proverb is still extant and is well known today; no one is a good master who has not previously been a servant.
Aristotle quotes this in the Politics, book 3: Therefore this also is rightly said, that no one can rule well who has not himself been ruled,' and in the same book, "For they say that it is necessary for the one who is going to rule well to be ruled first himself". Plato expresses it in a more proverbial form, in the Laws, book 6: "Now it is necessary that every man think this about all men, that the one who has not been a servant will by no means become a master worthy of praise". Plutarch, To An Uneducated Ruler': 'For those who have fallen are unequal to the task of setting up others, nor is it for the ignorant to teach, or the disorderly to create order, or the undisciplined to impose discipline, or for one to rule who has not undergone rule". The same writer gives this particular praise to Agesilaus, that he came to a position of command well trained in obeying command. Seneca, On Anger, book 2: "No one can rule but the man who can also be ruled". The proverb arose out of that famous saying of Solon, which is quoted in his Life by Diogenes Laertius: "Rule, but after first learning to be ruled". It can be applied either to those who by first obeying others' rule learn to rule others, or to those who exercise control over their own desires before they take control of other people. A person who is a slave to his own emotions is certainly not fit to rule over others; and he cannot be a king to others unless his own king is reason.
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Serio sapiunt Phryges
The Phrygians learn wisdom too late.
This proverb is taken from that very old tragedy of Livius Andronicus entitled The Trojan Horse. It is used by Cicero in his Letters to Friends: "You know you are in the Trojan horse; the Phrygians learn wisdom too late". It fits those people who repent too late of the stupidities they have committed. The Trojans, for instance, after so many disasters, only began to think of giving back Helen when nearly ten years had elapsed; whereas if they had handed her back at the very beginning when Menelaus asked for her, they would have saved themselves from innumerable calamities. Euripides in the Orestes: "Now you are prudent late. Since then you left your house in shame." The words are those of Electra to Helen. This is mentioned also by Festus Pompeius as being a proverb. According to Plutarch, Demades used to say that the Athenians never decided to make peace until they wore mourning; meaning that they had such an unnecessary lust for war that only the destruction of their own kinsmen could warn them to think of peace. But how much more insensate are we than the Athenians! Not even the misfortunes of so many years have taught us to hate war, nor do we even now at long last begin to think about peace, which ought to be perpetual between Christians.
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Malo accepto stultus sapit
Trouble experienced makes a fool wise.
Hesiod expressed the same thought, though a little differently, when he said in his book entitled Works and Days: "His punishment the wicked man receives. At last, but only pain instructs the fool." Homer too seems to allude to the same saying in the Iliad, book 23: '... so that paying up, you'll know the truth." Plato in the Symposium: 'I am saying this to you also, Agathon, so that you may not be deceived by this, but take warning from the knowledge of what happened to us; and that you should not, like the fool in the proverb, learn wisdom through the experience of evil." Plautus' phrase in the Mercator is to be classed with this: "Happy is he who learns wisdom at another's cost." Similarly in the Elegies of Tibullus, book 3: "How happy is he, whosoe'er he be, / Who from another's woe learns woe to flee." This is what those speeches of the tardily-wise mean: "Now I know what love is." "Now I understand that she is wicked and that I am wretched." "Ah, fool that I am, I have just tumbled to it at last."
The adage seems to spring from that very old story about the two brethren, Prometheus and Epimetheus, which is told in Hesiod, more or less in this way. Jupiter was angry with Prometheus because he had stolen fire from heaven and given it to men; and wishing to play a similar trick on him, gave Vulcan the job of making the figure of a girl out of clay, with the greatest possible skill. When this was done, he required each of the gods and goddesses to endow this image with his or her gifts. This is clearly why the name Pandora was invented for the maiden. Then, when the image had been showered with all the endowments of beauty, accomplishment, brains and speech, Jupiter sent her to Prometheus with a box, beautiful indeed, but concealing inside it every kind of misfortune. Prometheus refused the present, and warned his brother that if any kind of gift was brought in his absence, it must not be accepted. Back comes Pandora and, having persuaded Epimetheus, she gives him the box. As soon as he had opened it, and understood, as the diseases flew out, that Jove's 'gifts were no gifts' he began to be wise, but too late. Hesiod clearly refers to the adage when he says "He took it, and touched by woe understood at last". He says the same in the Theogony: she gave birth to Prometheus, 'the cunning one' (so he calls him) 'of many wiles / And Epimetheus, whom mistakes made wise/ Hence Pindar in the Pythians calls him 'late-wise/ Their very names indicate this. For Prometheus means in Greek a man who takes counsel before acting, and Epimetheus one who acts first, and only then does common sense enter his head. To act like Prometheus, prometheuesthai, is to meet misfortunes when they threaten by taking thought. Lucian in one of his dialogues quotes from some comedy-writer or other the following line, attacking Cleon on the ground that he was only wise too late when the business was all over: "Cleon is a Prometheus after the fact". Again, at the end of the same dialogue: "To take counsel after the event is like Epimetheus, not Prometheus". The proverb is also found in the form [Greek] More prudent after hard experience, and again in this form: [Greek] From what you suffer, you learn, or (giving the sense rather than the words) What hurts is what teaches, Quae nocent docent. But it is much more circumspect to learn prudence from the ills of others, according to the Greek saying: "I learnt my lesson watching others' ills". There is a word going round among my own people: "It is through shame and loss that mortals grow wiser".
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Aliquid mail, propter vicinum malum
Something bad from a bad neighbour
Lysimachus in the Mercator of Plautus: 'Now I am finding out the truth of that saying, something bad comes from a bad neighbour'. From these words of Plautus it is abundantly clear that this remark was well known in common speech. Hesiod voiced it elegantly in the book called Works and Days:
When trouble falls at home the neighbours come
Without their belts, relations gird themselves;
An evil neighbour is a mighty woe,
A useful one the greatest boon; to him
Who lacks good neighbours there's a lack of honour,
Nor would an ox die, were there no bad neighbour.
This saying holds good not only as between private neighbours, but experience has shown whole peoples overthrown by their neighbours. This happened to the Aetolians and Acarnanians, who destroyed each other by mutual conflict, close as their borders were. So also the Carthaginians and Byontini, whose history is told by the scholiasts on Hesiod. Virgil appears to have made a passing allusion to this in the Eclogues: 'No harm will come to them from neighbouring flocks', and 'Poor Mantua, too near to doomed Cremona'. The proverb is a warning that we should seek out the society and companionship of good men, and separate ourselves as much as possible from bad ones. So it was clever of Themistocles in Plutarch when he was selling an estate, to cause the auctioneer to add 'that it had also good neighbours' as if this recommendation would make it much more saleable. And not so very far away from this is the saying from the poem of that same Hesiod: 'Oft the whole people suffers for one bad man's misdeed'.
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Manus manum fricat
One hand rubs another
Socrates in the Axiochus of Plato says that Prodicus the sophist was always quoting this line of the comic poet Epicharmus: 'Hand rubs hand; give something, and you get something'. Here Socrates is poking fun at the profiteering of a man who never taught anyone for nothing, and from whom he himself admitted that he had learnt what he was then about to say, and that not gratis - far from it, he had paid in coin. A notion worthy of a Sicilian, or of a 'crafty poet' for that is what Cicero calls him. It warns us that there is almost no one to be found among mortals who is willing to bestow a benefit on anyone else, without hoping that some profit will redound to himself; a favour is the result of another favour, one kindness is called forth by another kindness. The same adage exists in the form 'One hand washes the other.' The two metaphors have the same force, for it is a matter of mutual convenience when one hand rubs or washes another. Among the Greek maxims this couplet is in circulation: Town preserves town, one man likewise another; / Hand washes hand and finger washes finger'. Seneca makes use of this too in his amusing skit on the death of the emperor Claudius.
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Sus Minervam
The sow (teaches) Minerva
This adage is a very common one among Latin authors:[..]
The sow teaches or advises (understood) Minerva. This was usually said whenever some ignorant and silly person attempts to teach the one by whom he ought rather to be taught; or, to borrow the words of Festus Pompeius, 'when one instructs another in what he himself does not know'. The point is that the guardianship of the arts, and of the talents, is ascribed by the poets, as I have said, to Minerva. Furthermore, there is no animal more brutish than a pig, or more filthy, whether because it eagerly revels in dung, or because of the huge size of its liver, the seat of concupiscence and lust; or because of the grossness of its nose and dulled sense of smell, which results in its not finding a foul stench offensive. Added to which it is so turned towards the ground, so intent on its food, that if by any chance it is forced to look upwards it is struck dumb with stupefaction, this being so unusual, as we are told by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Nor is there any other animal more unmanageable, just as if it were intended by nature not for any other purpose (as some beasts are) but solely for the pleasure of the table. Pliny testifies to this, book 8 chapter 51: This is the most irrational of animals, and it used to be thought (not unamusingly) that a soul was given it only as salt. Varro says the same in his Agriculture, book 2: 'They say that the swinish tribe was provided by nature for good food, and that they were only given a soul to act like salt and preserve the flesh.'
The meaning of these words is explained by Cicero in the fifth book of the De finibus: 'For the inanimate or nearly inanimate creatures that are created and preserved by nature have all of them their supreme good in the body; hence it has been cleverly said, as I think, about the pig, that a soul has been bestowed upon this animal to serve as salt, and keep it from going bad. But there are some animals which possess something resembling virtue, lions for example and dogs and horses; in these we may observe not only bodily movements as in pigs, but in some degree a sort of mental activity also. Aristotle in his Physiognomonica writes that men with low foreheads seem to be unteachable and unsuited to processes of learning, and to belong to the swinish kind, as though utterly foreign to docility and the arts of men. For almost all other creatures are capable, he says, of being taught; so that now we commonly call swine those people who are slow-witted and seem born for belly and stomach. Suetonius too in his list of famous grammarians reports that Palaemon had arrogance enough to call Varro a pig, as if literature had been born and was to die with himself. If we want to indicate that something is uncultured and illiterate, we say it comes out of the sty, as Cicero puts it in the In Pisonem: 'products of the sty, not of the school/ That is what gave rise to this adage, The sow teaches Minerva.' In Cicero, in the second book of the De oratore, Lucius Caesar says: 'So in the hearing of Crassus I will speak first of humour, and play the sow teaching the great orator, of whom Catulus said, when he heard him recently, that the other speakers ought to eat hay/ Cicero again in the Academic Questions, book 1: 'Even if it be not a case of the proverbial sow teaching Minerva, anyway whoever teaches Minerva is doing a silly thing'. Jerome Against Rufinus: 'I leave aside the Greeks, whose wisdom you vaunt, and while you are running after foreign things you have almost forgotten your own language, in case it should seem, in the words of the old proverb, that the sow was teaching Minerva'. He also uses it in different words in the letter to Marcellus beginning 'Charity knows no measure'. Varro and Euemerus refer the adage to fables, or at least one may guess this from the words of Pompeius:
'This thing lies open to all as they say, yet they prefer to wrap it up in stupid stories rather than quote it simply'. The jeering answer of Demosthenes is well known, when Demades shouted at him 'Demosthenes wants to correct me like the sow teaching Minerva,' and he replied, 'But last year this Minerva was taken in adultery'. The saying refers to the fact that Minerva was a virgin goddess.
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Invita Minerva
Against Minerva's will
In Latin there is another very popular saying, 'against Minerva's will' for something which is done against one's bent, in defiance of nature, without the blessing of heaven. Cicero in De officiis: 'against Minerva's will, as they say'. Again in his Letters to Friends, book 12: 'During the Quinquatria I pleaded your cause before a full house, not without the blessing of Minerva'. Also in the same work, book 3: 'As it is your wish, I may say that I shall do so "not against Minerva's will."' Horace says, 'Naught without Minerva's aid shall you do or say'. Seneca was alluding to this when he said 'Force a mind and it will not respond'.
Collected Works of Erasmus
VOLUME 31 ADAGES
