Science & Tech Quote by Publilius Syrus

Art and science don’t get to be the clean opposites we like to assign them. Publilius Syrus, a Roman writer of razor-edged maxims, frames both as two-faced: not in the sense of hypocrisy, but in the sense of performance. “Expression and illusion” is a warning shot at anyone who treats art as pure sincerity. Expression is real enough, but it arrives dressed up as craft, convention, seduction. Illusion isn’t a flaw; it’s the medium. Art works precisely because it can make something invented feel intimate, inevitable, even true.

Then Syrus turns the blade toward science, and the phrasing is deliberately destabilizing. We expect science to be “truth” and art to be “illusion.” Instead, science has “the reality of error” and only “the phantom of truth.” Error is what science can guarantee: experiments fail, models collapse, measurements drift, consensus revises itself. That’s the reality, the daily labor. Truth, meanwhile, is spectral - not because it’s fake, but because it’s always provisional, glimpsed through instruments and assumptions that will later look quaint.

The subtext is Roman and pragmatic: distrust any institution that claims a monopoly on certainty. In Syrus’s world, rhetoric ruled courts, emperors ruled lives, and survival depended on reading appearances. This line doesn’t sneer at knowledge; it punctures our craving for final answers. Art tells the truth by lying well. Science earns its authority by admitting it can be wrong.