Did they really say it?

A sentence travels under the name of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca or Epictetus — on a poster, in a feed, as the epigraph of a book — and the name gives it weight. The question this section answers is narrow: is that sentence in the works, in the editions we can read? We do not judge whether the sentence is wise. We look for it.

The editions searched are those the site and the app rest on, all in the public domain: for the Meditations, George Long’s English translation of 1862, and in French Auguste Couat’s of 1904 with Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire’s of 1876 beside it; for Seneca, the Letters to Lucilius in Richard Mott Gummere’s translation and the dialogues in Aubrey Stewart’s, with Joseph Baillard’s French of 1861 for both; for Epictetus, the Enchiridion in Elizabeth Carter’s translation of 1758 and Jean-Marie Guyau’s of 1875, and the Discourses in George Long’s selection of 1877 and the chapters Victor Courdaveaux translated in 1862. Their extent is not complete, and it is listed below, edition by edition: a page never claims more than what was searched, and names it.

The search is mechanical, and that is its worth. Two fragments of four to six words are taken from the sentence, in English and in French, and looked for in every file of every edition, after normalising case, apostrophes, quotation marks, punctuation and line breaks, so that a phrase split across two lines of a scanned book is still found. The command and its result are printed on each page, and the build replays them: a proof that no longer matches its file stops the site from being published.

Four verdicts, and nothing in between. Attested: the wording is there, at a locator, and the edition is quoted. Paraphrase: the idea is there, at a locator, but the wording is a translator’s or a later hand’s — the edition is quoted, and the sentence as it circulates is not called false, since it is in the text in substance. Not found: neither fragment appears in any edition searched; the page says which editions, and stops there. Misattributed: an earlier source is documented, in a named edition, and it is not the author on the poster. A verdict is never stronger than its evidence: “not found in our editions” is not “never said”, and the pages do not say the latter without a source.

Many of the sentences that circulate are twentieth-century translations, sometimes excellent, sometimes free, and those translations are under copyright. A page quotes only the public-domain edition, at its locator, so that a reader can open the book and check. The passage as the app gives it appears when the chapter is free in Stoïque — Marcus Aurelius — with its reference; Seneca and Epictetus are cited from their editions only.