Festina lente
Make haste slowly: a classical oxymoron urging balanced urgency.
Festina lente, or speûde bradéōs, is a classical adage and oxymoron meaning 'make haste slowly,' sometimes rendered in English as 'more haste, less speed.' It has been adopted as a motto by numerous figures, including the emperors Augustus and Titus, the Medicis, and the Onslows, and was used during the 1960s Cuban Revolution in its message to the masses. The original form is Classical Greek, with the Latin translation festīnā lentē, both using second-person-singular present active imperatives for 'make haste' and adverbs for 'slowly.'
Quick Facts
- Original language
- Classical Greek
- Notable adopters
- Augustus
- Titus
- Medicis
- Onslows
- Cuban revolution usage
- 1960s
- Renaissance printer
- Aldus Manutius
- Motto of
- Onslow family of Shropshire
- Favourite of judge
- Sir Matthew Hale
Facts from the source article.
History
The Roman historian Suetonius, in De vita Caesarum, reports that Augustus deplored rashness in a military commander and that 'σπεῦδε βραδέως' was one of his favourite sayings. Certain gold coins minted for Augustus bore images of a crab and a butterfly as an emblem for the adage; other visualizations include a hare in a snail shell, a chameleon with a fish, a diamond ring entwined with foliage, and a dolphin entwined around an anchor. Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, took festina lente as his motto and symbolized it with a sail-backed tortoise, an emblem painted by Giorgio Vasari about a hundred times in the Palazzo Vecchio.
The Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius adopted the dolphin and anchor as his printer's mark; Erasmus, whose books Manutius published, featured the phrase in his Adagia and used it to compliment his printer. Manutius showed Erasmus a Roman silver coin, given to him by Cardinal Bembo, that bore the dolphin-and-anchor symbol on the reverse. The adage was popular in the Renaissance, and Shakespeare alluded to it repeatedly, copying the crab and butterfly imagery in Love's Labour's Lost with the characters Moth and Armado.
The French poet and critic Nicolas Boileau, in his Art poétique (1674), applied the dictum to the work of the writer. Jean de la Fontaine alluded to the motto in his fable 'The Hare and the Tortoise,' writing that the tortoise 'with a prudent wisdom hastens slowly.' The Onslow family of Shropshire has the adage as its motto, generating a pun on the family name: 'on-slow.' The adage was a favourite of the influential judge Sir Matthew Hale.
Allusions
The term "Festina Lente Limit" appears in physics as another name for the Strong Confinement Limit, a state of an atom laser where the Bose–Einstein condensate emits at a frequency lower than the trap's confinement frequency. Composer Arvo Pärt created a piece titled Festina lente for strings and harp; in it, some instruments play the melody at half-speed while others play at double-speed, so the music is simultaneously fast and slow. Goethe references both the proverb and its adoption by Emperor Augustus in his poem Hermann und Dorothea, where the German version, "Eile mit Weile," conveniently rhymes.
In W. S. Gilbert's Iolanthe, the Lord Chancellor tells someone to "recollect yourself" and be careful, citing the ancient Roman phrase. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Dr. Van Helsing suggests that Count Dracula's motto could be festina lente, noting the vampire's patient, slow approach. Robin Sloan's novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore features a secret society devoted to Aldus Manutius, whose members use "Festina lente" as both a motto and a greeting.
Basketball coach John Wooden frequently employed the adage in his coaching writings, rephrasing it as "Be quick, but don't hurry."
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