Afterlives: one line traced through Classica Codex
Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit.
Going along with people makes friends. Telling the truth makes enemies.
Terence, Andria 68, first staged in 166 BCE
A freedman says this in passing in a Roman comedy. Over the next eight centuries it turned up in a dialogue on friendship, a rhetoric handbook, a defence of Christianity, a commentary on Paul, a quarrel between two saints and a grammar book. This page follows it, passage by passage.
- The source
- Found by the matcher
- Found, low confidence
- Missed by the matcher, found by searching
- Outside the search
What the trail shows
- The line changes job. It starts as a passing remark and becomes a moral problem. From Quintilian on it is a textbook specimen, and Christian writers also turn it into an argument.
- Christian writers tied it to Paul. Four witnesses set it beside Galatians 4:16, “Have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?” Jerome is the earliest dated witness of the four in this library. The sermon listed under Augustine is undated.
- Half the line travelled alone. Lactantius wanted only the part about truth and hatred. He called the poet almost inspired, then later corrected him.
- It reached the quarrel between Augustine and Jerome. Jerome quoted it on Galatians, and about twenty years later Augustine quoted it to Jerome, in a dispute over Galatians.
The trail
- 166 BCE
A line in a play
Terence Andria 67–68
Sapienter vitam instituit: namque hoc tempore obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit.
He has set up his life wisely. These days, going along makes friends, and truth makes enemies.
A freedman says it in passing, about a young man who never opposes anyone.
The source
- 44 BCE
A problem about friendship
Cicero On Friendship 89
sed nescio quo modo verum est, quod in Andria familiaris meus dicit: obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit. molesta veritas, siquidem ex ea nascitur odium, quod est venenum amicitiae, sed obsequium multo molestius
Somehow it is true, what my friend says in the Andria: “going along makes friends, truth breeds hatred.” Truth is a nuisance, since hatred grows from it, and hatred is the poison of friendship. But going along is far worse.
The speaker is Laelius, remembered as Terence's friend. The quip becomes a real question: which does more harm?
Outside the search
- c. 95
A rhetoric example
Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 8.5.4
aliquando simplicem … aliquando ratione subiecta … nonnumquam duplicem: obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit.
A maxim is sometimes simple, sometimes comes with its reason, and sometimes is double: “going along makes friends, truth breeds hatred.”
It is now a specimen in a handbook, chosen because it has two halves.
Outside the search
- c. 310
An argument for the persecuted
Lactantius Divine Institutes 5.9.6
huius tanti et tam pertinacis odii quam potissimum causam esse dicamus? utrumne ueritas odium parit, ut ait poeta quasi diuino spiritu instinctus…
What shall we say is the main cause of this great and stubborn hatred? Does truth breed hatred, as the poet says, as if moved by a divine spirit?
He keeps only the second half and uses it to explain why Christians are persecuted. At 5.21.1 he says it again: the truth is with us, and truth, “as was most truly said”, breeds hatred.
Found; 5.21.1 missed
- c. 315
The poet corrected
Lactantius Epitome 59.8
quae licet sit ad praesens insuauis, tamen cum fructus eius atque utilitas apparuerit, non odium pariet, ut ait poeta, sed gratiam.
Though truth is unwelcome for the moment, once its fruit and use appear it will breed not hatred, as the poet says, but gratitude.
A few years later the same author overrules the line he called inspired.
Found, low confidence
- c. 387
A rival to Paul
Jerome Commentary on Galatians, at 4:16
Similis est huic illa sententia nobilis apud Romanos poetae: Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit. Sed vide quanto hic melius quam ille
Like this is that famous saying of a Roman poet: “going along makes friends, truth breeds hatred.” But see how much better this man is than that one.
Paul asks, “Have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?” Jerome sets the two side by side and gives it to Paul, who aimed the thought at particular people and softened it.
Found by the matcher
- c. 390
Back on stage
Ausonius Game of the Seven Sages 191
Latine dictum suspicor: plures mali. / dixisse nollem; veritas odium parit.
I expect it has been put in Latin: most men are bad. I wish I hadn't said it. Truth breeds hatred.
Bias of Priene speaks in a literary game written as a little play, so the half-line returns to the stage.
Found, low confidence
- c. 404
A friendly warning
Sulpicius Severus Dialogues 1.9.3
caue ne et te aliquis, qui haec agnoscat, exaudiat teque una cum Hieronymo incipiat non amare. nam quia scolasticus es, non inmerito te uersu comici illius admonebo: obsequium amicos, ueritas odium parit.
Take care that no one who recognises this overhears you and starts to dislike you along with Jerome. Since you are a man of letters, I can fairly warn you with that comic poet's line: “going along makes friends, truth breeds hatred.”
A joke among friends, with Jerome as the cautionary example.
Found by the matcher
- 405
A rebuke between friends
Augustine Letter 82.31, to Jerome
nescio enim, utrum Christianae amicitiae putandae sint, in quibus magis ualet uulgare prouerbium: Obsequium amicos, ueritas odium parit, quam ecclesiasticum: Fideliora sunt uulnera amici quam uoluntaria oscula inimici.
I do not know whether friendships should count as Christian when the common proverb, “going along makes friends, truth breeds hatred,” carries more weight in them than the Church's: “More faithful are the wounds of a friend than the eager kisses of an enemy.”
Written in their long quarrel over Paul's letter to the Galatians, the text Jerome was commenting on when he quoted this same line. In the next section Augustine hopes that truth, which friendship is owed, need not breed hatred. Whether he had Jerome's page in mind cannot be told from the text.
Found by the matcher
- c. 450
Beside Paul, poet unnamed
Quodvultdeus Book of God's Promises 2.35.81
Sed quoniam, ut ait quidam, Veritas odium parit (unde et Paulus noster dicit: Inimicus factus sum vobis verum praedicans), pro munere verae religionis ostensae, in lacum leonum Babylonii devorandum prophetam miserunt.
But since, as someone says, truth breeds hatred (which is why our Paul says, “I have become your enemy by preaching the truth”), the Babylonians threw the prophet into the lions' pit as a reward for showing them the true religion.
Terence is now just “someone”, and the line explains Daniel. The library lists this book under Prosper of Aquitaine; modern scholars usually credit Quodvultdeus of Carthage. The matcher misses it because the scan of Migne reads Veriras.
Missed by the matcher
- c. 560
A textbook example
Cassiodorus On the Liberal Arts, PL 70, 1166A
Sententiale est quod sententia generalis addicit; ut apud Terentium: Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit.
The “sentential” argument is one that a general maxim clinches, as in Terence: “going along makes friends, truth breeds hatred.”
Terence gets his name back, in a list of kinds of argument.
Found by the matcher
- c. 585
Beside Paul
Eutropius On the Discipline of Monks 2
Inimicus vobis factus sum verum dicens vobis. Unde et saecularis poeta: Obsequium, inquit, amicos, veritas odium parit; amara est enim veritas, et qui eam diligunt, replentur amaritudine.
“I have become your enemy by telling you the truth.” So too the secular poet says, “Going along, he says, makes friends, truth breeds hatred,” for truth is bitter, and those who love it are filled with bitterness.
A letter by Eutropius, then an abbot and later bishop of Valencia, defending monastic discipline. It has the same pairing of Terence and Galatians 4:16 that Jerome made about two centuries earlier.
Found by the matcher
- c. 630
A grammar specimen
Isidore of Seville Etymologies (four places)
Sententia est dictum impersonale, ut: Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit. Huic si persona fuerit adjecta, chria erit, ita: Offendit Achilles Agamemnonem vera dicendo.
A maxim is an impersonal saying, such as “going along makes friends, truth breeds hatred.” Add a person and it becomes a chreia: “Achilles offended Agamemnon by telling the truth.”
Isidore uses it twice for this definition, once in Cassiodorus's exact words, and once to show one verb serving two clauses. Nothing is left of the freedman, or of the quarrels.
Found by the matcher
- Date unknown
Beside Paul
Sermon listed under Augustine On Eating the Lamb 5
Unde et Apostolus ait, Inimicus vobis factus sum, vera dicens: et proverbium saeculi gentilis quoque poeta exprimens, Obsequium, inquit, amicos, veritas odium parit.
So the Apostle says, “I have become your enemy by telling the truth,” and a pagan poet puts the world's proverb the same way: “Going along, he says, makes friends, truth breeds hatred.”
The library lists it under Augustine. That attribution has not been checked here, and it has no place on the chart.
Found by the matcher
How this was traced
A matcher compared 1.65 million sentences from the Patrologia Latina and CSEL with classical Latin, by two routes. One needs several rare words close together in both texts. The other looks for short runs of consecutive words, such as a half-line, that are rare in both the classics and Christian Latin.
Together they give 9,380 candidate matches, 4,135 of them rated high. Of those, 1,556 are centos built from Virgil or early-modern Latin that Migne files under ancient names, which leaves 2,579 plain citations. Claude read a random sample of 40 of those one at a time and accepted 39 as quotations or close verse echoes. Codex, an AI model from OpenAI, read a different random 40 and accepted 35, so expect about one in ten to be wrong. In Claude's samples roughly a third of the low-confidence matches are real, so they are leads, not findings. Claude read every passage on this page in context.
For this line, a direct text search found 16 passages in those two collections. The matcher finds 14: 11 at high confidence and 3 at low. Before the second route it found 10. It still misses two, Quodvultdeus and Lactantius 5.21.1, which shares only the two words odium parit. Two of Lactantius's passages share a row here, and Augustine's second use sits in his note. Cicero, Quintilian and the Perseus copy of Ausonius sit outside the search, which looked only in those two collections.
The direct search looked for this wording, so differently worded echoes may be missing. English translations are by Claude. Dates are conventional and approximate, and they come from general knowledge, because the library does not date its works. Obvious scanning errors in Migne have been corrected. Author names follow the library, with modern views noted where they differ.
More lines to follow
Every citation found so far can be browsed in the Afterlives Reader.
- spiritus intus alit … mens agitat molem, Aeneid 6.726–7: 8 witnesses, one of them anonymous and three at low confidence
- deum namque ire per omnes terrasque tractusque maris, Georgics 4.221–2: 5 authors and a cento
- et belli rabies et amor successit habendi, Aeneid 8.327: 3 authors and two centos
- hinc metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque, Aeneid 6.733: 4 authors, one copying another
Who made this, and sources
This is AI work, and no specialist has reviewed it. Claude, an AI model from Anthropic, wrote the matcher, read these passages, wrote the notes and made the English translations. A person chose the project and decided to publish it.
- Perseus Digital Library, canonical-latinLit, for the classical authors: CC BY-SA 4.0
- Open Greek and Latin, Patrologia Latina: CC BY-SA 4.0, as each file states
- Open Greek and Latin, CSEL: CC BY-SA 4.0, as each file states
The text of this page, the translations included, is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0, as its sources require. The texts were read in Classica Codex.