The Antiquity of Proverbs

INTRODUCTION

THE origin of most proverbs is unknown. "They were anterior to books," says Disraeli, "and formed the wisdom of the vulgar, and in the earliest ages were the unwritten laws of morality." As a nation's proverbs predate its literature it is impossible to trace them to their beginnings. "They spring from an unknown source, increase in volume as they roll on and are adopted by all as unconsciously as they have sprung into existence." It is a mistake to assume that the earliest known record of a saying indicates its origin. Many with which we are familiar were, so far as we know, first used by the Romans, but the Latin language was the medium of innumerable Greek phrases that predate their Roman use and they may have been the utterances of unknown philosophers, the fragments of lost historic records, the attributed responses to ancient oracles or the accepted lessons of forgotten myths and fables. Articles sometimes appear in public print that

refer to sententious phrases that are found in modern volumes, as proverbs, in forgetfulness of the fact that sayings, no matter how wise or clever they may be, never become proverbs until they are made so by common repetition.. "Many grubs never grow to butterflies," says a North British Review contributor, and a maxim is only a proverb in its caterpillar stage—a candidate for a wider sphere and larger flight than most are destined to attain. A sentence must be accepted by the people and used by them in every day speech before it is entitled to a place among the folk sayings of a nation. The process by which a saying is converted into a proverb is slow and may take decades if not centuries.

THE ANTIQUITY OF PROVERBS

In youth we thought that the proverbs quoted by our elders were mere "ways of speaking," borrowed from others of their own generation. As we grew older and sought to discover from whence they came we were surprised to learn that many, if not all of them, had been used for centuries not only by our forbears but all over the world. Some we learned were used eighteen centuries ago by Plutarch the biographer and moralist, others by Menander the poet, who died over three hundred years before Plutarch was born; others by Theognis the elegiac poet of

Megara five hundred years before Christ. Theognis' poems contained so many proverbs that a large number of them were selected and used as precepts for the conduct of the young. Others were repeated by Theophrastus, Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras, the Greek philosophers.

Our surprise was great when we were told that Pindar, the Lyric poet, and friend of Theron and Hieron had, a half millennium before the Christian era, penned the words that Paul heard from the illumined heavens when on his way to Damascus "It is hard for thee to kick against the goad."

Then we read the fables of Æsop, who belonged to an age a little earlier than that of Pindar, and found that all his wonderful stories were in a sense amplified proverbs and from which we may have derived our "One swallow does not make a summer," "Heaven helps those who help themselves," "You cannot wash a blackamoor white," and "Look before you leap."

Searching still further we found evidences that some of our proverbs may have been familiar to Solon, the lawgiver and poet, and to the Seven Sages of Greece. Did not Periander declare that "Nothing is impossible to industry" and Thales say that "He that hateth suretyship is sure, or secure?" A phrase that Solomon, King of Israel, listed among his wise sayings three hundred years before the time of Thales. We found also that among the goodly number of men who

strengthened their utterances with well-chosen proverbs was the Greek poet Hesiod, and before him Homer, the author of the Iliad and Odyssey.

But our surprise was greatest when we discovered that the phrases, "He who is wrong fights against himself" and "Thou hast the advantage of the angry when thou keepest silence," were found in "The Precepts of Ptahhotep," dating back to a period three thousand and more years before the advent of our Lord.

Who knows but that all the men to whom reference has been made, and a multitude of others who lived in by-gone ages borrowed their wise sayings from the talk of the firesides and the conversations of the market places; so that the origin of many proverbs now flippantly quoted in the converse of men is lost in the mists of forgotten centuries.

THE ANCESTRY AND INFLUENCE OF PROVERBS

Though many of our common sayings seem crude and even coarse to modern ears, they have an honored ancestry and have been used not only by rough and uncouth people but by the wisest and noblest of teachers, so that Lord Chesterfield's slurring statement was out of place that they were the flowers of the rhetoric of vulgar men and characteristic of bad company.

By them parents encouraged their children, teachers instructed their pupils, authors im

pressed their readers, orators moved their auditors and preachers warned and guided their congregations in ways of uprightness and truth. Leaders of men in all departments of life have used them with confidence and power, and quoted them freely in their conferences and counsels. They have enriched the tales of travelers, strengthened the convictions of moralists, been received as warnings by the wayward, furnished rules of conduct for tradesmen, consoled the downtrodden and depressed and stimulated the young to earnest endeavor. "Sermons of the Reformation are full of them," says a contributor to the North British Review. "Latimer often clinched his argument with a text from this oral Bible of the multitude; and Jewel mingled them with aphorisms almost as good of his own invention with the ready wit of these 'wise saws,' John Knox had his quiver richly furnished. There is nothing of which Jeremy Taylor does not contain something, consequently his works are spiced over with a good sprinkling of proverbs."

In olden times the influence of proverbs over the hearts and lives of men was second on'y to the Bible. Few there were who dared to question their usefulness or authority. Sir William Sterling-Maxwell reminds us that "the qualities which have shaped the destinies of Scotland are those which are mainly inculcated in her proverbs" and adds "The story of Bruce's Spider,