Sources and translation
Cittadella presents four works of Stoic philosophy in its own translations into English and Italian. This page says which editions we translate from, how the Italian and English translations are made and whom we thank.
The works and the editions
| Work | Language | Edition we translate from |
|---|---|---|
| Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν) | Greek | J. H. Leopold, M. Antoninus Imperator Ad Se Ipsum, Leipzig, Teubner, 1908 |
| Epictetus, Enchiridion (Ἐγχειρίδιον) | Greek | H. Schenkl, Epicteti dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, editio maior, Leipzig, Teubner, 1916 |
| Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 1 to 40 | Latin | R. M. Gummere, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library, 1917 |
| Seneca, On the Shortness of Life (De brevitate vitae) | Latin | The Latin Library transcription, which does not name the printed edition it follows |
The digital texts come from the Perseus Digital Library and from The Latin Library: see the credits below.
The numbering follows each edition. In the Meditations, Leopold prints as a single chapter what are usually V, 36 and V, 37 (in Cittadella, V, 36), and he joins to chapter XII, 17 what is usually XII, 18. The Letters to Lucilius are divided into letters and paragraphs with the usual numbering.
How the Italian translation is made
- We translate from the Greek and Latin with the help of artificial intelligence (Anthropic's Claude models), one section at a time, with these rules: faithful and complete, in today's Italian, without old-fashioned words, keeping the author's images, without additions, omissions or commentary.
- A second model, from OpenAI, then compares each translated section with the original and flags omissions, additions, errors of meaning and errors of numbering. Each flag is reviewed against the original, and the sections found to be wrong are corrected and compared again.
- A sample of the best-known passages is reread against the original, and the corrections are recorded.
- The words the editor adds to the transmitted text are translated; the words the editor deletes are not. Notes and critical apparatus are not included.
How the English translation is made
- We translate into English from the Greek and Latin, not from the Italian, with the help of artificial intelligence (Anthropic's Claude models), one section at a time, with these rules: faithful and complete, in today's English, without old-fashioned words, keeping the author's images, without additions, omissions or commentary. We did not use existing English translations.
- Cittadella's Italian translation is used only to align choices about the text, such as uncertain readings and the editor's supplements, so that the two languages agree.
- A second model, from OpenAI, compares each English section with the original and flags omissions, additions, errors of meaning and errors of numbering. Each flag is reviewed against the original, and the sections found to be wrong are corrected.
The translations can contain inaccuracies. If you find one, write to support@cittadella.app with the citation of the passage.
Public domain
The four works are ancient. The editions by Leopold (1908), Schenkl (1916) and Gummere (1917) are in the public domain: the right in critical editions under Italian copyright law (Art. 85-quater of Law 633/1941) lasts 20 years and expired long ago. The text of On the Shortness of Life is marked as public domain (Public Domain Mark 1.0) by the collection it comes from.
Credits
The Greek and Latin texts of the Meditations, the Enchiridion and the Letters to Lucilius come from the Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University (PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit and PerseusDL/canonical-latinLit), whose XML encodings are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0). Cittadella extracted the text from those encodings, removed the notes, the page breaks and the critical apparatus, corrected two encoding errors, in Meditations, VII, 51 and in Letters to Lucilius, 24, 10, and translated it into Italian and English.
The Latin text of On the Shortness of Life comes from The Latin Library, in the cltk/latin_text_latin_library collection of the Classical Language Toolkit.
Thanks to everyone who prepared these editions and these collections and makes them available to all.
How to cite a passage
Give the author, the work, the reference and the translation, for example: Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 1, 1, Cittadella's Italian translation, https://cittadella.app/seneca/lettere-a-lucilio/1/1. Every passage page on cittadella.app shows its citation, in Italian, ready to copy.