c. 1466–1536 · Dutch Renaissance humanist & scholar
Erasmus of Rotterdam was the leading humanist of the Northern Renaissance, whose Adagia gathered and glossed thousands of classical proverbs for Europe’s learned readers. Among them was “Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit” — his Latin rendering of an ancient Delphic oracle, the answer the god is said to have given the Spartans (Lacedaemonians) when they consulted Delphi. Carl Jung found the adage in an edition of Erasmus as a young man and later made it his personal motto, carving it over his doorway and onto his tomb — which is how a 16th-century humanist’s Latin came to be read as a ‘Jung quote.’