Commentatio publishes condensations of older works, written in the voice of the person who wrote them.
Every work condensed here is out of copyright, and so is the translation it was built from. Each essay carries its own citation: the work, the speaker, and a link to the public-domain edition behind it. That citation is the authority, not this page — this publication grows, and the list of what is in it lives in the archive rather than in a legal notice.
Where the translation most often anthologised is still in copyright, it is linked rather than copied, and an older public-domain rendering is used instead.
A condensation is a set of choices about what to keep. Those choices are the author's, and somebody else would have made different ones. Read the source and you may conclude this publication emphasised the wrong thing — a reasonable conclusion to reach, and the reason the source is always named.
Some of these works are read today as practical guidance, and get shelved beside self-help. They are not that, and this publication is not that either.
Nothing here is medical, psychiatric, psychological, legal or financial advice. An essay describing how a man trained himself to go without, or reasoned his way to obedience, is describing what he thought — not prescribing a regimen.
Older writers also reach conclusions the modern world does not share. Those passages are rendered as arguments, because that is what they are. They are not recommendations.
The author uses AI in the making of this work, and would rather say so plainly than leave you to wonder.
What that means here is a pipeline built for the purpose. AI is used to locate public-domain editions and verify their provenance, to read long source texts in full, and to draft the condensations. It is used to check that a claim attributed to a writer is actually in his text and not remembered from somewhere else, and to flag where a compression has quietly changed the argument.
What it does not do is decide what a piece is for. The selection — which works, which passages, what gets cut and what the essay is built to arrive at — is the author's, as is the judgement that these should be written in the original voice rather than narrated about. Every source text sits in the archive next to the essay drawn from it, so the compression can be checked against the thing compressed.
An error here is the author's. It does not become the machine's fault because a machine was in the room.
Errors get fixed, and material corrections are noted in the piece rather than quietly edited out. If a condensation misrepresents its source, say so and name the passage. The essay either improves or it goes, and both outcomes are useful.