Researchers Discover 90 Previously Unknown Greek Proverbs
Two Norwegian researchers discovered a total of 90 previously unknown Greek proverbs in a library in Orléans, France completely by chance, according to a University of Oslo report.
Han Lamers, professor of classics at the University of Oslo and director of the Norwegian Institute in Rome, and his colleague Toon Van Hal, who is also a professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, were doing research at the library when they accidentally stumbled upon a manuscript no one knew existed.
The two professors were looking for old handwritten manuscripts. Proverbs were not the main purpose of their visit to the library, but their inquiring minds immediately registered that the manuscript was something of intellectual value.
“When you leaf through manuscripts on topics you are interested in, there’s always a chance you may stumble upon something nobody knew existed,” Van Hal says.
The accidental finding was a collection of Greek proverbs. At first, the researchers assumed these were already known sayings, the manuscript, however, was unknown. It turned out that it contained a surprisingly large number of previously unknown proverbs.
The proverbs had been collected by the Greek priest Hermodorus Rhegius in the 17th century. He was already known as a collector of Greek proverbs but had no more than 30 to his name when Van Hal and Lamers came across the manuscript in Orléans.
‘A cognitive shortcut’
“Proverbs are a kind of cognitive shortcut. They make things simpler than they really are. We know that life is somewhat more complicated, but proverbs convey condensed experience in a very efficient way,” Lamers says.
“Everyone remembers them easily because they are so short and because they have a certain rhythm. It’s not so easy to find out where they come from, but they have been passed down from generation to generation,” he adds.
“The apple does not fall far from the tree”, “All that glitters is not gold,” are proverbs that are heard in almost every country.
According to NAOB, the Norwegian digital library that is updated continuously, a proverb is ‘a fixed linguistic expression that sums up a general experience or rule for life, often in figurative form.’
There is an entire field of research devoted to proverbs. It is called paremiology, and it brings together linguists, historians, cultural historians, and scholars from other disciplines. Lamers and Van Hal have now caused a bit of a stir within this research community with their discovery.
Hermodorus Rhegius
Hermodorus Rhegius (1579 – 1655) lived and worked in the Aegean islands. He was one of the Greek scholars of the early modern era, who contributed to the spreading of Greek education in Europe. In his collection he recorded proverbs of the living Greek language, preserving valuable elements of the everyday thoughts and experiences of the Greek world.
“We actually don’t know very much about Hermodorus. We know that he left Greece to study in Rome, and that he returned to the Aegean islands on a mission for the Catholic Church,” Lamers says.
There he conducted a kind of missionary expedition in the Aegean, seeking souls he could convert from the Greek Orthodox to the Catholic faith. Along the way, he wrote down the Greek proverbs he encountered.
“It’s hard to say why he was so interested in these proverbs. It may be that they served as a tool in his work as a priest. That he used them in sermons or in his writings to communicate simple truths to the local population,” the researcher says.
The newly discovered proverbs
The newly discovered Greek proverbs include:
The fool makes himself rich in his thoughts, and the lazy man in his words.
You do not know the swimmer when he goes into the water, but only when he comes up again.
Whoever spits towards the sky, spits himself in the face.
Vinegar that you get for free tastes like honey.
You can lose the ring, but you keep the finger.
If the monastery has bread, it will never lack monks.
We spilt the oil, but it fell into the pot.
The two researchers have focused on cataloguing the proverbs and reconstructing the journey they took from the Greek islands to the Middle East and from there to France.
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