Henry VII's chapel found at Greenwich (England)

Telegraph ^ | January 25, 2006 | Nigel Reynolds

[Verginius Rufus]

Some authors have so many quotable lines (Ovid, Horace, Cicero, Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Groucho Marx, etc.) that they often get credited with someone else's saying.

The familiar version of the quote seems to be from John Harington, but it's possible that he was inspired by a Latin saying to the same effect. Erasmus had compiled a large collection of adages, so men like Harington could have run a saying of Ovid there and rendered it into English. But I think Ovid was one of the authors widely read by educated people at that time (his treatment of mythology in the Metamorphoses was very popular).