Lointains échos du vase de bronze de Dodone

The expression tò Dōdōnaîon khalkeîon (or khalkíon), often translated as "the bronze of Dodona", in Greek referred to a bronze vessel of the oracle of Dodona, in Epirus, which was said to resonate almost indefinitely if it was stimulated. This expression was used figuratively to describe a person who talked incessantly, as shown by a fragment of a lost play by Menander, a Greek comic author of the late fourth century BC. In this use, it was identified as a paroimía (a proverbial expression) and listed or mentioned by various authors, compilers, and lexicographers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This paroimía is then abundantly cited from the Renaissance onwards, especially in the Adages of Erasmus and in many dictionaries and encyclopedic works, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century and to the present day. Curiously, however, beyond this scholarly knowledge, the actual use of this paroimía seems rare in the texts of Antiquity that have come down to us. It is hardly more abundant in the centuries that follow. In French-language literature, some authors make a figurative use of the "bronze of Dodona" or the "cauldrons of Dodona", which often deviates from the application to excessively talkative people. Fine examples of such uses can be found in Rabelais. One of the last echoes of this famous Dodonaean vessel, quite striking, appears in Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, in a polemical passage aimed at Jules Romains. This note deals with the origin of this figure and its literary uses, through the traces of the bronze vessel of Dodona that we have been able to find in Greek and Latin texts and in French literature.