Sententiae of Publilius Syrus
A first-century BCE line collection that is the ancestor of the modern quote book.
Publilius Syrus was a Syrian-born mimewriter who worked in Rome in the first century BCE. Almost none of his plays survive; what survives is a collection of roughly seven hundred single-line maxims extracted from them by later compilers for use in schools.
That extraction is the point. The Sententiae is an early, well-documented case of a quotation anthology outliving the works it quarried — the same mechanism that later produced florilegia, commonplace books, and Bartlett's.
Because the lines were compiled and recompiled through the Middle Ages, the collection accumulated material Publilius never wrote, and manuscripts disagree on both wording and inclusion. Seneca, who quotes him admiringly, is an important early witness.
Common mistake: attributing every line in the collection to Publilius. Modern critical editions mark disputed and spurious entries, and a careful citation follows an edition's numbering rather than a website's list.
“A rolling stone gathers no moss.”
Keep reading the glossary
A short, weighty statement of general truth used to close or crown a passage of argument.
A 'bouquet' of extracts — a curated anthology of passages from other authors, gathered by theme.
The landmark English-language quotation reference, first published in 1855.
A quote attributed to a famous person that they almost certainly never said.