Festina lente - What Erasmus can make out of an adage

The Adagia of Erasmus of Rotterdam provides an example of the encyclopaedic and polihistorical character of the Humanist scholarship.

Just reading the Adagium Festina lente, it begins with etymological observations and citations from ancient authors like Aristophanes, Homer and Hesiod, and moves on to rhetoric and emblematic observations. He mentions a coin of Vespasian, whose backside shows a dolphin who embraces an anchor. However, what most amusing is how Erasmus makes out of this proverb a philosophy of time: dolphin is the symbol for quickness, whilst the anchor is the symbol for slowness. Together they display exactly this adagium. Erasmus goes on to a philosophical excursion and refers to Aristotle. What strikes me is how unaristotelian his account of the view of Aristotle on time is: he mentions the impetus theory, according to which the impetus is the smallest and indivisible  unit of time. It might be basing on the influence of late medieval natural philosophy, but it is not at all Aristotelian as Aristotle opposes to the atom theory of Democrit. According to Aristotle there is no smallest unit of time.

Just a note.

P.S. a quick search brings on to very interesting facts: the dolphin in the heraldry: John Vinycomb: Fictitious and Symbolic Creatures in Art, 1909.

And Alciato expanded on this emblema (from http://www.mun.ca/alciato/, a wonderful discovery! the whole Liber Emlematum of Alciato as online edition!). Though in a different meaning than Erasmus: 

Alciati Emblematum liber

Emblema CXLIV
Princeps subditorum incolumitatem procurans

Titanii quoties conturbant aequora fratres,
  Tum miseros nautas anchora iacta iuvat:
Hanc pius erga homines Delphin complectitur, imis
  Tutius ut possit figier illa vadis.
Quam decet haec memores gestare insignia Reges,
  Anchora quod nautis, se populo esse suo.

Commentary to this Emblema (from the same project: http://www.mun.ca/alciato/index.html):
The "Titan brothers" are the winds. The kindness of dolphins towards men was written about very early (eg, Aristotle History of Animals book 5). The anchor as a sign of political stability appears in a number of classical authors.

Erasmus in his Adages has a full discussion of the anchor and dolphin, but interprets it quite differently from Alciato, under the heading of "Festina lente" or "Hasten slowly" where the swift movement of the dolphin is tempered by the stability of the anchor (2.1.1; trans Collected Works of Erasmus 33:3-17). The symbol appeared on an ancient coin of the emperor Titus Vespasian in AD 80. Apparently (note in CWE 33:340) the juxtaposition of anchor and dolphin had been associated with the god Neptune and the coin was issued in propitiation for the eruption of Vesuvius the year before. Erasmus sees the symbol as a hieroglyphic, which he explains in a long passage. Aldus Manutius (Aldo Manuzio, the Venetian printer, d 1515), published the 1508 edition of Erasmus' Adages, and in his adage 2.1.1 Erasmus tells how Aldus showed him the ancient coin of Vespasian. Aldus had been familiar with this symbol for some time. It appeared in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published by Aldus in 1499, as a "hieroglyphic" symbol. Soon after Aldus began to use the anchor and dolphin as his mark, and it was retained by his family after his death (you can see it on the title page of the 1546 edition). It is perhaps the most famous trademark in the history of Western printing.