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Knott ( B.I. ) , [dagger]Fantham ( E. ) (trans.) Collected Works of Erasmus: Apophthegmata . (Collected Works of Erasmus 37-8.) Pp. xxxii + 1011. Toronto, Buffalo and London : University of Toronto Press , 2014. Cased, US$304. ISBN: 978-1-4426-4166-2 (2 vol. set).
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When Erasmus wrote his Institutio Principis Christiani in 1515 for the young Charles, the future emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, he presented it in the form of short, pithy sentences (sententiae) to make the reading less boring. Moreover, he made use of plenty of lively anecdotes and quotations. In the dedication he described his method with the following words: 'I have taken Isocrates' work on the principles of government and translated it into Latin, and in competition with him I have added my own, arranged as it were in aphorisms for the reader's convenience, but with considerable differences from what he laid down' (CWE 27, p. 204). A large part of his mirror-for-princes is devoted to the outline of an educational programme for the young prince with practical advice on how to raise him from early childhood to a mature and virtuous adulthood. Sixteen years after the publication of the Institutio Erasmus addressed himself to the fifteen-year-old prince William the Younger, Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, to whom he had already dedicated his treatise on the education of children (De pueris instituendis). This time he offered him an enormous collection of apophthegmata, 'things well said', 3,080 in total. The subject was well chosen in accordance with the prince's young age. Erasmus described it as 'milk for a prince of tender years' (p. 17).
The nice two-volume translation of the Apophthegmata in the famous Collected Works of Erasmus series gives more than one reason for intellectual joy. First, it sheds more...