Wordcraft Home Page    Wordcraft Community Home Page    Forums  Hop To Forum Categories  Questions & Answers about Words    "All's fair in love and war"
Go
New
Find
Notify
Tools
Reply
  
"All's fair in love and war" Login/Join
 
Member
posted
What is the earliest known appearance of the phrase "All's fair in love and war"? Not the exact phrasing, but the sentiment?

A poster on another board claims, "The earliest source is from Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde (c.1380)," but I have two problems with his view, which he does not support with any exact quote or secondary authority:
  • I can't find it anywhere in Troilus. Nothing that I could recognize after a computer search on the original Middle-English text. Perhaps some of you can handle that language better than I.
    . . .(I couldn't find any free modern-English text, but did try the non-free ones in Amazon's search-inside-the-book feature. Nothing found there either.)
  • Since many others expressed the sentiment after Chaucer, is it credible that that none of the Roman writers said it centuries before him?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: wordnerd,
 
Posts: 1184Reply With QuoteReport This Post
<Asa Lovejoy>
posted
I can't find proof right now, but I'd swear it's from Juvenal.
 
Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
Picture of Kalleh
posted Hide Post
That would seem plausible, but I couldn't find it either. I found this list of Juvenal's quotes. I wonder what is so intolerable about a wealthy woman. Wink
 
Posts: 24735 | Location: Chicago, USAReply With QuoteReport This Post
  Powered by Social Strata  
 

Wordcraft Home Page    Wordcraft Community Home Page    Forums  Hop To Forum Categories  Questions & Answers about Words    "All's fair in love and war"

Copyright © 2002-12