Planudean Anthology, stoic, Erasmus, Scottish humanist, George Buchanan, Sir Francis Bacon, The World, pleasures, pitfalls, marriage
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162
stoic epistemologies, in which the worth of life in all its variations are disputed, is also shorn down to the topic of marriage alone in several of these exchanges.
284
Several answer-poems concerning marriage derive from companion poems that Erasmus transcribed from the Planudean Anthology in his adage ‘Optimum non nasci’ in which it is contested whether life promises any pleasure for men, and thus whether it is worthwhile to have been born.
285
The Scottish humanist, George Buchanan, is responsible for another Latin rendering of these verses. His reputation during the Reformation was commensurable with, albeit less prominent than, that of Erasmus. He not only shared the Rotterdam scholar’s distaste for monastic life and for clerical abuses, he was similarly perceived as a pioneer of proto-Protestant values.
286
An English version of this contemptus mundi debate that shows traits of Buchanan’s influence appears in Tottel’s Miscellany among the pieces attributed to Nicholas Grimald.
287
The companion poems dispute the fulfillment to be found at court, at work, abroad and at sea before settling finally upon the pleasures and pitfalls of marriage:
Strife, with a wife, without, your thrift full hard to see:
Yong brats, a trouble: none at all, a maym it seems to bee:
Youth, fond: age hath no hert, and pincheth all to nye.
Choose then the leefer of these twoo, no life, or soon to dye.
(no. 151, ‘Mans Life after Possidonius, or Crates’, ll.7-10)
[Answer]
A wyfe will trym thy house: no wife? then art thou free.
Brood is a louely thing: without, thy life is loose to thee.
duties of the married couples towards one another.
284 The scope that such poems typically attempt to encompass is reflected adequately by the title of Sir Francis Bacon’s cynical poem, ‘The World’; a verse likewise derived from the Planudean Anthology verses and met with a stoical palinode (see Cat. Anon 36).
285 Collected Works of Erasmus, [86 vols] (London and Toronto: Toronto UP, 1974- ), XXXXXXIII (XXXIII): Adages, trans. R. A. B. Mynors (1991), pp.160-2 (p.161).
286 D. Macmillan, George Buchanan: A Biography (Simpkin; Edinburgh: Morton, Marshall, 1906), pp.57-61.
287 Rollins ed. (1928-9) observes that the titles of Buchanan’s ‘E Graeco Possidippi, seu Cratetis’ and ‘Contraria sentential verisimilis, ex Metrodoro’ from his Poemata (1566) bear a close resemblance to the titles chosen by Grimald, II. p.236.
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