On Persistence

I'm pretty sure everyone's heard the old standard, "to err is human, to forgive is divine", first written by Alexander Pope in his work "An Essay on Criticism". However, I came across an interesting tidbit in perusing Wikipedia's "List of Latin Phrases (C-E)" (for my thesis... knowledge of latin phrases is a bit too arcane and dry for me, which is saying something).

It looks like Alexander Pope's phrase was a retooling of an older phrase attributed to Seneca the Younger, a Roman philosopher from the wee years of the first millennium (he lived from 4 BC to AD 65, which preceded Pope by about 17 centuries or so). Seneca originally stated "errare humanum est perseverare diabolicum", which translates to "To err is human, to persist is of the devil", which is certainly as true as Pope's phrase. Of course, our less poetic 21st century language would probably be a bit more blunt about it.