Latin proverb
13 entries
About
Latin sayings are short sentences that have come down to us from ancient Rome, in the language of the Romans. Some are lines of Roman poets, orators and philosophers, such as Virgil, Horace, Cicero and Seneca, that became so well known that their authors were forgotten; others were proverbs among the people long before anyone wrote them down. For many centuries after the fall of Rome, Latin remained the language of the Church, of learning and of law in Europe, and with it these sayings lived on in schools and in books. In 1500 the Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam published his Adagia, a collection of Greek and Latin proverbs with commentaries, which grew to more than four thousand entries.
Many of these sayings are still quoted in Latin today, in speeches, on coats of arms and over the doors of schools, and almost every European language has taken them over in translation. Behind “To err is human” stands Errare humanum est, and behind “One hand washes the other”, Manus manum lavat.
- Sayings 13