Joe Biden, Proud Intellectual

In case you missed it, the Weekly Standard had an amusing article a couple of weeks ago about the Veep’s efforts to smarten up his speeches with quotes from famous authors. Money graf:

Of course, Biden’s pretensions generally escape factchecking by the press. Biden’s erstwhile rival, Sarah Palin, has come under fire for including in her memoir observations falsely attributed to Plato that were ripped from quote websites. Fair enough. But what about Biden? In multiple speeches, he has credited “the poet Virgil” with the aphorism “the greatest wealth is health.” And sure enough, Virgil is credited with the quote in thousands of Google hits, QuoteGarden.com, and even boxer shorts for sale on Amazon.com. But good luck finding the phrase anywhere in the Latin poet’s actual writings. A search of the phrase (or even similar terms)–in English and Latin–in databases of Virgil’s poetry yields nothing. Richard Tarrant, a professor of Latin at Harvard, says: “I’m not familiar with the quote (which sounds like something my mother used to say), and offhand I would doubt that it comes from Virgil.” Two classicists at Cornell, while unable to prove that the poet never said anything like it, “doubt whether this quote comes from Virgil.” One, Barry Strauss, adds: “It sounds more like a fortune cookie than a poet.”