Homo homini lupus, or in its unabridged form Homo homini lupus est, is a Latin proverb meaning

Homo homini lupus - Wikipedia

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2021-08-01 17:30:12

Homo homini lupus, or in its unabridged form Homo homini lupus est, is a Latin proverb meaning "A man is a wolf to another man," or more tersely "Man is wolf to man." It has meaning in reference to situations where people are known to have behaved in a way comparably in nature to a wolf. The wolf as a creature is thought, in this example, to have qualities of being predatory, cruel, inhuman i.e. more like an animal than civilized.

A variation of the proverb appeared as line 495 in the play Asinaria by Plautus: "Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit",[2] which has been translated as "Man is no man, but a wolf, to a stranger," or "A man is a wolf rather than a man to another man, when he hasn't yet found out what he's like."

As a counterpoint, Seneca the Younger wrote, in his Epistulae morales ad Lucilium (specifically, Epistula XCV, paragraph 33), "homo, sacra res homini",[3] which has been translated as "man, an object of reverence in the eyes of man."

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