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Situational Irony
Preface to Thomas More
Explanation and Analysis:
The style of The Praise of Folly is highly classical and erudite, reflecting Erasmus’s thorough education in the Greek and Roman classics. In the preface of the essay, addressed to Erasmus’s close friend and fellow scholar Thomas More, Erasmus points to the long classical lineage of the learned style he adopts in the essay:
Let any, however, who are offended by the lightness and foolery of my argument remember, I beg, that mine is not the first example, but that the same thing was often practised by great authors. Homer, all those ages ago, made sport with a battle of frogs and mice; Virgil, with a gnat, and a salad; Ovid, with a nut. Polycrates eulogized Busiris; and Isocrates, though a castigator of Polycrates, did the same; Glaucon argued in praise of injustice; Favorinus, of Thersites and of the quartan fever; Synesius, of baldness; Lucian, of the fly and of the parasite.
Despite the occasional frivolity of the essay, Erasmus notes that he draws stylistically from a number of classical sources that were highly respected in the early modern period, including the Ancient Greek poet Homer and the Ancient Roman poets Virgil and Ovid. These “great authors,” he reminds the reader, also wrote in the style he uses in The Praise of Folly, satirically inflating some petty or minor subject. Just as he writes in praise of the goddess “Folly,” so too did classical writers offer grand praise to such undeserving subjects as frogs, mice, gnats, nuts, baldness, and even the concept of “injustice.”
Related Themes:
