About

Who writes this, and how the sources are checked

I am Gio White. I built Marcus, a Stoic practice app for iOS, and I write the guides on this site. You can find me on LinkedIn.

What I am not

I am not a classicist. I do not read Greek or Latin, I hold no degree in ancient philosophy, and nothing here should be taken on my authority.

That is deliberate rather than apologetic. Every substantive claim on this site is tied to a text you can open yourself: a book, a chapter, a letter number. If I have read a passage wrongly, the citation is right there for you to check, which is a better arrangement than asking you to trust a credential.

What I have actually done

In August 2026 I audited the quote library inside the app, one passage at a time, against its sources. It went in with 374 entries and came out with 224, over several passes that each found a different kind of problem.

Fifty-five entries were not what they claimed to be. Some belonged to other philosophers, some to other centuries, and two had been written for the app and quietly attributed to Marcus Aurelius. Marcus was credited with a line from Gladiator. Seneca was credited with a Semisonic lyric. Aristotle’s single most quoted sentence turned out to be Will Durant paraphrasing him, and it was in the library twice, in two different wordings.

I published the findings rather than quietly fixing them, because the same quotations are still circulating everywhere else, and because a philosophy about seeing things as they are deserves better sourcing than it usually gets.

The audit was not complete. Six more were still live afterwards, and came out only because Gregory Sadler and Thomas Colligan had already traced them. Their names are on the page, because a site about attribution that took credit for other people’s research would be self-refuting.

That is the entire basis on which I would ask you to take this site seriously. Not expertise. Willingness to check, to publish what checking turned up, and to be corrected.

Editorial rules

These are the rules the app and this site are held to. They exist because breaking them is how the library got into the state it was in.

A quotation names its work. Where a passage can be pinned to a chapter or letter, the citation is recorded. Where it cannot, it is marked unverified rather than dressed up.
No invented citations. A confidently wrong verse number is worse than none, so passages that could not be pinned were left uncited instead of given a plausible-looking reference.
Unsourceable passages are removed, not kept. If no text contains it, it does not appear, however good the line is.
Attribution over provenance. A non-Stoic may be quoted when the content is defensibly Stoic and the byline is accurate. Voltaire is credited to Voltaire.
Translations are not silently edited. House style is American English; quotations keep the wording their translator used, and titles keep their own spelling.
Interpretations are labelled as interpretations. Sharon Lebell’s The Art of Living is a rendering, not a translation, and is credited to her.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, I want to know, and I will fix it and say that I did. That applies to a citation, a translation, an image credit, or an argument. Write to hello@getmarcus.app.

Running a page that corrects other people’s attributions while being unreachable about my own would be indefensible.

Affiliate disclosure

Book links on this site are affiliate links, Bookshop.org first and Amazon as a fallback. They earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Nothing is listed that I would not recommend without them, and the full disclosure is on the Library page.

Marcus is a daily Stoic practice for iOS: a morning preparation, a daily reading, and a structured evening examination.

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