In The Praise of Folly, in 1509, Desiderius Erasmus personified folly as a goddess. She develops the thesis that folly is good and that it is deserving of praise. Folly remarks on her own ubiquity — since we all, the wise and the unwise, live in folly’s grip. “Fortune herself,” Folly tells us, “the directrix of human affairs, is so thoroughly of a mind with me that she always has been most hostile to the wise.” Socrates figures repeatedly in The Praise of Folly, his life a spectacle of wisdom turned to folly. Socrates is the wisest man in a city said to favor wisdom, and after being put on trial for no actual crime he is compelled to commit suicide. This exemplary teacher is executed — absurdly — for corrupting the morals of the young. His gift for wisdom had been a death sentence.
Fitzgerald’s Follies
