Translator: P B Reviewer: Luba Aleksandrova
Good evening.
So, as I can see that
you are getting a little bit bored,
I am going to tell you a story.
There was once an Athenian,
who had a certain cargo full of goods
to transport to a neighboring city,
50 kilometers from there, let's say Megara.
So it was not very far.
What does our man do?
At that time, obviously no trucks,
no taxis, cars, coaches...
He goes to the donkey renter's house on the corner of the street,
he rents a donkey to make the journey.
And on that day, in the morning,
we have all three,
the man, the donkey, and the renter who came along,
they loaded the donkey
and set off towards Megara.
And they walk and walk
all morning,
et then it starts to get hot,
and around noon, it starts to get very hot.
Of course, this is in the middle of summer,
there is a terrible heat.
The man starts to feel sick,
he's parched.
He looks around,
not a tree, not a fountain, a river,
not a single inn.
He thinks: "Oh no,
I can't survive the entire day like this."
What does he do? He has an idea:
he stops the donkey, he unloads it,
and he goes to sit down under the donkey's belly
in the shade.
As soon as he's settled under the donkey's belly,
the donkey renter throws himself on him
and shouts: "What? Get out!
You're not allowed to stay there!
Get out from there! Bastard!"
The man tells him: "Hey, calm down! I'm staying here."
"No, you're not allowed to!"
"I'm not allowed to?
And why am I not allowed to?"
"Because I rented you my donkey,
I didn't rent you the donkey's shadow."
The man replies tit for tat:
"Absolutely wrong!
I rented the entire donkey, including the shadow."
And it starts to get ugly.
They insult each other, they come to blows,
and it ends in court.
You would like to know
how this ended, I assume?
Well, you will not know.
You will not know,
because I do not know myself.
Because I read this story
in one of Erasmus' Adages
Adage 252, if I'm not mistaken.
And in this adage, Erasmus says that
he himself read in the works of a certain Greek author, Plutarch,
in the "Life of Demosthenes" that, one day,
Demosthenes, a very famous Athenian orator,
found himself defending a man
in a rather serious case,
the man risked his neck.
So, Demosthenes, before the assembly,
lanches into one of his extraordinary speeches,
rich in arguments, in images,
and he develops and develops...
And in the middle of his speech,
Demosthenes notices that the magistrates
are starting to be inattentive.
One is reading the newspaper,
the other is sending text messages on his Blackberry,
the third is chatting with his neighbor,
and the fourth is dozing off.
What does Demosthenes do?
He stops dead in his plea.
He steps down from the stage,
he walks towards the gallery
where the magistrates are,
and tells them: "Gentlemen, there was once
an Athenian who had a load to transport
to a neighboring city, Megara."
And he starts to tell them the story
that I told you just now.
He tells it until the exact moment where
the men come to blows
and the matter is taken to court.
And he stops dead.
You can imagine how the magistrates react:
they prick up their ears and say:
"So?"
So, Demosthenes tells them:
"Gentlemen, do you realize
what you are doing?
I am talking to you for a man who risks his neck,
and you are not listening to me.
I am talking to you about a donkey's shadow,
and you are there, all ears."
One can imagine that they felt ashamed.
And I imagine that you are going to ask yourselves:
"So, was the man ...
did he save his neck?"
Well, you will not know either
because Erasmus does not tell,
and therefore Plutarch does not tell.
But Erasmus draws two lessons from this matter.
The first, which is rather immediate and obvious,
is that enormous conflicts
are often born from tiny, futile, derisory causes.
The donkey's shadow, we fight about it, it will go a long way.
Wars, even, remember.
Maybe you weren't born at the time, all of you.
The famous football war
between Honduras and Guatemala,
which started during a football match.
There were nevertheless 300 dead.
That's the first lesson.
And then, Erasmus says: "Yes but
it's an intricate story,
because there is the story,
and then the story of Demosthenes
telling the story.
And from the second part,
we can draw another lesson."
That lesson is for orators, obviously.
And here it is:
Speaker, if your audience is bored,
tell them a story.
And this is how Erasmus concludes his adage.
So now, I should tell you a few words
about what these famous adages are,
which disappeared from the shelves of European libraries
around 500 years ago,
and that I had published very recently,
last year, at
So, this book is totally exceptional.
First, it's a book that was actually published
in the beginnings of printing
Printing had been invented
barely 50 years earlier, in 1508, in Venice.
It's a big book.
A book which -- we counted the characters --
has more than 4 million characters.
I don't know if you know a bit about publishing.
A book with one million characters,
it's already a very big book.
4 million, that's enormous.
And this book has a distinctive feature.
Well, it has quite a few distinctive features
but there is one which I find very pretty
it's...
One could say: "It's like...
-- you know, the old fantasy that an author
a library, or a teacher have -
it's the book that contains all the books."
The book, "The Adages",
it's a pile of quotes from authors
of all antiquity, from Homer to,
for Erasmus, the most recent authors,
who were Byzantines.
So, Latins, Greeks, Pagans,
there are almost no Christians,
for other reasons --
and Erasmus quoted from all of their works,
so, some are very famous:
Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles,
of course, everyone knows them,
everyone has heard of them,
and then he quotes others,
whom I have never heard of before,
neither have the colleagues with whom we translated, by the way.
And Erasmus quotes all these people,
in a complete mess,
it's totally disjointed,
He quotes a story about ants,
and after that, a story about the Pythagoreans'
mathematical conceptions,
and after that, he goes on about customs
of such people living in India.
That's totally heterogenous.
It jumps from pillar to post all the time.
In this compilation,
which has more than 4,000 adages,
there are 4,151, that's really something!
However, if we do the maths,
that's more than
4,000 short pieces.
Most of the 4,151, there are 4,000
that are justn half a page long.
Some have 3 lines,
sometimes, he lets loose and
he makes a small 50-page treaty
on a subject he holds dear,
but in general, it's very short.
This book has had a very curious fate.
It had a roaring success when it was published.
That's what made Erasmus famous.
We knew of, we counted,
more than 30 editions published in his lifetime,
which is indeed a lot.
A similar book, you can imagine, even now,
not a lot of authors
have had 3 editions of their books in their lifetime.
And this book has completely vanished
since the middle of the 16th century,
because the Council of Trent
put it on the index of banned books,
it was deemed dangerous,
because it was considered too critical,
it deviated too much from the usual paths.
But it was extremely popular.
How are the adages composed?
They are all more or less composed in the same way.
There is the title, which is the adage.
So, it's a word, a phrase,
a verb, a short sentence.
The references.
It tells you: "That, I found in Homer,
in Plato, in X, in Y,
the variants, in the others,
it is said a little differently,
in the moderns,
it is said a bit differently too,
my caretaker says it like that."
And then, the lesson is drawn,
a moral lesson, well,
in which circumstances it can be used.
I mean, it's a set of phrases,
a sort of treasure
of all of ancient literature,
especially Greek,
which gives you an arsenal,
a treasure of elegant phrases
to use in modern conversation.
For example, "I will not talk to you
about the donkey's shadow,
but about a far deeper subject,
as my colleagues will do after me."
Or even: "Oh, it's hard, you know,
not everybody
can land at Corinth," etc,
and the story is told.
Now, how is that related with our matters, you tell me?
Well, it so happens that
while I was contacted by TED for this talk,
I did what everybody does,
I searched on the Internet
what it's about,
what exactly these talks are.
And I realized one very strange thing:
these TED conferences, what are they?
They are short, totally heterogenous,
you jump from the pillar to the post, even this evening,
if I've understood well, the topics
bear no relation with one another,
it's varied, why?
because it interests the audience, the reader,
it's assumed to be very elegant, of course,
a beautiful rhetoric,
so you must have
the metaphorical means to express yourself
and so you have patterns
that are completely against the current trend
of the time at this period,
where we like big, systematic and boring treaties
and we try to vulgarize it,
that is to introduce an educated audience
to extremely deep and diverse topics,
that can be of interest to the entire planet.
Thank you.
Applause.