Lucretius c. 100 BCE

“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

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Lucretius

De rerum natura

c. 100 BCE

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“The idea that all preferences are relative, and that no generalizations can reasonably be made about them, is probably older that civilization itself. It almost certainly predates Roman poet Lucretius, but it is his version that is widely regarded as the classic instance – and justly, too, because although the sentiment may be commonplace, this is a prime example of true wit, which Alexander Pope defined as ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’.

The original line in Latin was ‘quod ali cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum’ (‘what is food for one person may be bitter poison to others’). Later, the axiom infiltrated most, and possibly all, local languages in the Roman Empire.

In English, the oldest recorded occurrence of the expression is in the autobiography of composer Thomas Whythorne (c. 1576). By the early 17th century, the phrase had evidently been reduced to the familiarity of cliché: in 1604, the playwright Thomas Middleton described it as ‘that old moth-eaten proverb’.

Another Latin adage that convers the same ground is ‘ de gustibus non est disputandum’, which may be loosely translated as ‘there’s no accounting for taste’.(JP)

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