What Was I Telling You About Quotations?

By Jamie on January 31, 2024

I came across a quote on Twitter attributed to Benjamin Franklin a few years ago. It appeared just like this:

JUSTICE will not be served until those who are UNAFFECTED are as outraged as those who ARE.

I liked the sentiment. I'd been watching the Affordable Care Act debates in Congress—Trump was trying to kill it yet again, and one of the folks I follow on Twitter had said, "My biggest problem in these ACA debates? I don't know how to explain to you why you should care about other people." Exactly.

This line from Franklin was similar but, you know, historic, so I wrote it down and started researching. Well, Dear Reader, it goes back much further than old Ben. Here's the edited version:

Wrongdoing can only be avoided if those who are not wronged feel the same indignation at it as those who are.
—Solon the Lawgiver (c640–c556BC), as cited in "Florilegium" by Joannes Stobaeus (5th century CE)

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For your further information, my dictionary tells me that floriegium is a volume of writings, an anthology. Wikipedia tells us:

In medieval Latin, a florilegium (plural florilegia) was a compilation of excerpts or sententia from other writings and is an offshoot of the commonplacing tradition. … Medieval florilegia were systematic collections of extracts taken mainly from the writings of the Church Fathers from early Christian authors, also pagan philosophers such as Aristotle, and sometimes classical writings. A prime example is the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland, which was completed at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The purpose was to take passages that illustrated certain topics, doctrines or themes. After the medieval period, the term was extended to apply to any miscellany or compilation of literary or scientific character.

But wait—commonplacing tradition? Wikipedia has more:

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.

Entries are most often organized under systematic subject headings and differ functionally from journals or diaries, which are chronological and introspective. …

Presumed to have been written in the fifth century Stobaeus compiled an extensive two volume manuscript commonly known as The Anthologies of excerpts containing 1,430 poetry and prose quotations of works of which only 315 are still extant in the twenty-first century.

Honestly, fascinating stuff. Human philosophy continues apace.