Help me cite ancient sources quickly!

[Epictetus]

How about Gibbons the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?

Ignore it. It's a splendid book, but it predates the invention of critical scholarship, which is a nineteenth-century development in Germany. His notes are, usually, to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French editions of classical texts, which have a different counting.

Well, I’m a huge fan of Gibbon. I think he is still relevant today, not only as a work of genius in literature but also for some of his ideas. But his scholarship methods are not only shaky by today’s standards, but they were also questioned in his day.

The remarkable mode of quotation which Mr. Gibbon adopts must immediately strike every one who turns to his notes. He sometimes only mentions the author, perhaps the book; and often leaves the reader the toil of finding out, or rather guessing at the passage. The policy, however, is not without its design and use. By endeavouring to deprive us of the means of comparing him with the authorities he cites, he flattered himself, no doubt, that he might safely have recourse to misrepresentation.

Mr. Davis

Such is the style of Mr. Davis; who in another place mentions this mode of quotation ‘as a good artifice to escape detection’… I may have accidentally recollected the sense of a passage which I had formerly read, without being able to find the place, or even to transcribe from memory the precise words.

Edward Gibbon, A Vindication

That cracks me up, that Gibbon admits that sometimes he simply couldn’t remember where he read something. You don’t see that today.