‘Scholars and Warriors’: quoting and misquoting Thucydides Or (alternative titles) Thucydides the Aphorist Quoting and Misquoting Thucydides Thucydides Quote Unquote Neville Morley Department of Classics & Ancient History University of Bristol 11 Woodland Road Bristol BS8 1TB United Kingdom n.d.g.morley@bris.ac.uk 1 ‘Scholars and Warriors’: quoting and misquoting Thucydides 1. On September 11th 1990, during hearings before the Senate’s Armed Services Committee on the crisis in the Persian Gulf, Senator William Cohen expressed concern about the level of support being offered by the United States’ various allies.1 I was looking at this morning’s headlines and stories, and I must tell you I was equally disturbed as Senator Kennedy. I went back to a writer who wrote about a war that took place some 2,500 years ago, and I remember reading a statement by Thucydides. And he said that, ‘For the true author of the subjugation of a people is not so much the immediate agent, as the power which permits it having the means to prevent it.’ And then there was this one phrase that I had remembered. He said, ‘Meanwhile, each fancies that no harm will come of his neglect, that it is of the business of someone else to look after this or that for him; and so, by the same notion being entertained by all separately, the common cause imperceptibly decays.’ And, ‘To you who would call yourselves men of peace, I say: you are nothing without men of action by your side.’2 Senator Cohen concluded his questions with a caution against the idea that the Iraqi forces could be wiped out in a few days with air power alone. Dick Cheney, Secretary of State for Defense, and Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then responded. Secretary CHENEY. Thank you, Senator. General. Senator COHEN. I might say that your silence will be construed as agreement. [Laughter] General POWELL. As the Senator knows, Thucydides also once said, ‘Of all elements of power, restraint impresses men most.’ Senator COHEN. I take it, then, that you too agree with my last statement? You and Thucydides? General POWELL. I agree that a powerful nation has to wield its power with care.3 When interviewed nearly twenty years later for a series on what great leaders felt they had learnt from the classics, Cohen again named Thucydides as one of his inspirations; for his belief ‘that human nature remained virtually unchanged, particularly when leaders were dealing with issues of international relations and the making of war and peace’, and for the spirit expressed in 1 I am exceptionally grateful to John Dodds for starting me on this line of investigation, to Ben Earley for his indefatigable research efforts, and to Christine Lee for her insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I should also like to thank Bob Fowler, Sara Monoson, Liz Sawyer, Nicholas Poburko and the Arion reviewers. This work was supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council through its funding of the research project Thucydides: reception, reinterpretation and influence at the University of Bristol. 2 Crisis in the Persian Gulf Region: US Policy Options and Implications, September-December 1990: S.Hrg. 101-1071, pp. 42-3. 3 Ibid., p. 45. 2 Pericles’ Funeral Oration, which ‘made it possible for me to bring comfort to the families of those who had lost their lives as a result of terrorist activities while I served as Secretary of Defense.’4 His evocation of Thucydides in the Senate hearing thus seems to reflect his own thinking and the tradition of classical references in US political discourse – but it also offered Powell a perfect opportunity to introduce his own favourite Thucydidean aphorism.5 According to Bob Woodward’s account of the first Bush administration, Powell’s fondness for this line – normally cited as ‘Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most’ – was already well established by the beginning of his term as Chair of the Joint Chiefs; it was a key element of his view on the proper use of military power, informing his response to the attempted coup in the Philippines in 1989 as it did his plans for Operation Desert Storm in 1991.6 Thereafter, no profile of Powell was complete without reference to the fact that he had the quotation on display in his office in the Pentagon, and he himself continued to cite it, not least in his valedictory speech as Chair of the Joint Chiefs. Undoubtedly as the result of Powell’s advocacy, it has been quoted a number of times in Congress over the last decade; internet searches for the phrase reveal that it has become a favourite motivational quotation and – less often attributed explicitly to Thucydides (or even Thucyclides) – a standard epigram for student essays on power, as well as appearing in a Tom Clancy novel, The Teeth of the Tiger. Although clearly neither the first nor the only public figure in the United States to refer to Thucydides, Powell could certainly claim to have played a significant role in keeping him in the public eye in recent years. Of course, as Shifra Sharlin pointed out in 2004, Powell’s favourite quotation is entirely spurious.7 It matches no existing translation of Thucydides, and nothing like it appears in the original Greek. One or two classicists have claimed that there is nevertheless a genuine connection to Thucydides, on the grounds that the line is a reasonable paraphrase – either of the speech of Nicias at VI.11.4, or of the speech of the Athenians at I.76.3 – but that then raises the question of who wrote such a paraphrase and how it came to be treated as a genuine quotation.8 A similar line appears in a speech by Lyndon B. Johnson in June 1964, delivered at the Annual Swedish Day Picnic in Minneapolis, in a passage dealing with US military involvement overseas: With these qualities as our foundation, we follow several goals to the single goal of peace. And what are these goals? First is restraint in the use of power. We must be, and we are, strong enough to protect ourselves and our allies. But it was a great historian who reminded us that: ‘No aspect of power more impresses men than its exercise with restraint’. We do not advance the cause of freedom by calling on the full might of our military to solve every problem.9 4 http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/18/william-cohen-classics-leadership-cohen.html. Accessed 03/12/12. 5 On classical references in the US, see e.g. M. Reinhold, Classica Americana: the Greek and Roman heritage in the United States (Detroit, 1984) and M. Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America (Malden MA & Oxford, 2009). 6 B. Woodward, The Commanders (New York, 2003), p. 153. 7 S. Sharlin, ‘Thucydides and the Powell doctrine’, Raritan 24.1 (2004), pp. 12-28. 8 Tim Rood (‘Feared in Sicily’, Times Literary Supplement, 15th October 2004) favours VI.11.4; Liz Sawyer (pers. comm.) has suggest I.76.3 instead. 9 Speech delivered at the Annual Swedish Day Picnic in Minneapolis: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26349#axzz1ovODcNpa. Accessed 03/12/12. 3 Johnson (or rather his speechwriter) does not name Thucydides, or any other historian, as the originator of the sentiment. Perhaps the ‘quotation’ was familiar enough to need no attribution, but it seems more likely that naming a specific author was judged too distracting (and ‘Thucydides’ perhaps too difficult to pronounce); it was enough to invoke the generalised authority of a ‘great historian’ to legitimise this characterisation of US foreign policy. However, this was not the only context in which this maxim might be deployed. Ten years earlier, another variant had appeared in a public lecture by John Lord O’Brian at Washington and Lee University on ‘Changing attitudes towards freedom’: I have spoken of the sense of decency and fairness of the plain American. There is another distinctive quality which has made possible our form of government and made possible self-government in the English-speaking world generally. That quality is self-restraint. One of the wisest sayings of Thucydides was: ‘Of all manifestations of power, restraint is the one which most impresses mankind.’ And I am bold to assert that evidences of this restraint have been sadly lacking in our government during the past dozen years.10 O’Brian had been discussing James Bryce’s Modern Democracies (New York, 1921), a work in which the principles of restraint and self-restraint are evoked several times – but not in these exact words, and without reference to Thucydides (although he is cited a few times elsewhere). The most likely candidate as the source for O’Brian and for Johnson’s speechwriter, if not for Powell, is The Practical Cogitator, or, the Thinker’s Anthology, edited by Charles P. Curtis and Ferris Greenslet, first published in 1945 and on its third edition by 1962. The ‘manifestations of power’ line appears on p.415, ‘as quoted by Walter Lippmann’, and the editors admit that they have been unable ‘even with the aid of the best scholars’ to find it in Thucydides. Their source has since been identified as Lippmann’s Today and Tomorrow column in the Los Angeles Times of 18th January 1944, discussing border disputes between Russia and Poland, in which he advised ‘reminding the Russians as well as ourselves of the great saying of Thucydides that “Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.”’11 This is the earliest example I have found of the quotation being applied to political and military matters. Interestingly, it was cited later the same year in an article discussing the role of the Supreme Court in reviewing, or declining to review, the decisions of lower courts – by Charles P. Curtis, co-editor of The Practical Cogitator and clearly the man responsible for disseminating Lippmann’s misattribution and, through successive editions, keeping it available for those seeking a suitable quotation on the theme of power and restraint.12 The quotation (in any of its variant forms) may not be found in Thucydides, but it is found in close association with Thucydides, namely in Charles Forster Smith’s Introduction to his 1921 translation in the Loeb Classical Library: 10 John Lord O'Brian, ‘Changing attitudes toward freedom’, Washington & Lee Law Review 157 (1952), http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol9/iss2/2. Accessed 05/18/12. 11 I owe this reference to Judge Douglas Woodlock of the District of Massachusetts in his written judgement on the case of the United States of America v. Lorraine Henderson, 25th April 2012 (Case 1:09-cr-10028-DPW Document 97; accessed via http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/04/30/Cleaning%20Lady.pdf, 05/18/12), where he cites the ‘counsel attributed to Thucydides’ but then notes its apocryphal status in an extensive footnote. 12 Charles P. Curtis, ‘Due, and democratic, process of law’, Wisconsin Law Review 39 (1944). 4 He packs his language so full of meaning that at times a sentence does duty for a paragraph, a word for a sentence. “Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most”, and however much we regret his reserve, since for much that he might have told us we have no other witnesses, we come more and more to regard this as great art.13 These lines are reproduced from Smith’s Presidential Address to the American Philological Association in 1903 on ‘Character-drawing in Thucydides’, published the same year in the American Journal of Philology.14 He does not on either occasion provide a source for the quotation, though it is explicitly marked as someone else’s phrase; apparently we are intended to recognise the source without difficulty. It is entirely natural to conclude that it must come from Thucydides himself, but the phrase does not appear anywhere in Smith’s own translation. In fact it seems to come from a discussion of Thucydides’ style in F.B. Jevons’ A History of Greek Literature, published in 1886: Of all manifestations of power, self-restraint impresses men most, partly because it is the form which power least often takes; and there is scarcely a page of Thucydides that does not exemplify his strength in this respect. Where stronger expression seems justifiable, where even it seems demanded, Thucydides contents himself with a sober statement. Events which call aloud for some expression of pity or of horror he leaves to speak for themselves, without a word from him. Where the temptation to any other writer to comment or to moralise would be irresistible, Thucydides resists it.15 Jevons’ book is not listed in the bibliography of Smith’s translation, nor cited in his article, but it nevertheless seems to have been familiar enough for Smith to borrow the phrase for his own discussion of Thucydidean objectivity, with only a minor change (‘restraint’ rather than ‘selfrestraint’). There are some significant differences of interpretation between the two scholars: the former emphasises the absence of authorial comment or moralising, and Thucydides’ refusal to resort to dramatic language, the latter emphasises the compactness and density of Thucydidean sentences. However, they both employ the phrase in a similar context, and both insist that this restraint is a vital element of Thucydides’ objectivity and standing as a historian. Can we trace this phrase any further back, or is Jevons’ own invention? His ironic remark that restraint is impressive ‘partly because it is the form which power least often takes’ suggests an addendum to an already-familiar saying. The fact that the line appears in a discussion of Thucydides’ style suggests that ancient rhetorical theory is one possible source, and indeed there are a number of passages in Quintilian that deal precisely with the importance of self-restraint in expression; for example, ‘The uninstructed sometimes appear to have a richer flow of language, because they say everything that can be said, while the learned exercise discrimination and self-restraint’, and ‘Above all, it involves a complete waste of one of the most valuable of an orator’s assets, namely that self-restraint which gives weight and credit to his words’.16 Several of Quintilian’s comments on particular historians reinforce the impression that 13 Charles Forster Smith, ‘Introduction’ to Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War Books I and II (Cambridge MA, 1921), pp. xvii-xviii. 14 AJPh 24.4: 369-87; quote at p. 386. 15 F.B. Jevons, A History of Greek Literature: from the earliest period to the death of Demosthenes (London, 1886), p. 340. 16 Institutio Oratio 2.12.6, 12.9.12; cf. also 1.9.17. 5 self-restraint was established as a historiographical virtue in antiquity: Thucydides is described as ‘compact in texture, terse and ever eager to press forward’, while Servilius Nonianus is criticised for being ‘less restrained than the dignity of history demands’.17 However, Smith and Jevons were by no means the only people in the late nineteenth century offering thoughts on the virtues of restraint as a manifestation of power. In midDecember 1895, Swami Vivekanada, a key figure in the introduction of Hindu thought to the West, gave a lecture in New York on ‘Karma in its effect on character’: It is the greatest manifestation of power--this tremendous restraint; self-restraint is a manifestation of greater power than all outgoing action. A carriage with four horses may rush down a hill unrestrained, or the coachman may curb the horses. Which is the greater manifestation of power, to let them go or to hold them?18 Despite the context, there may be a classical connection here too. Vivekananda had at least some knowledge of classical philosophy from his university studies in Calcutta – but since he graduated in 1884, this did not include Jevons’ work; whether it included Quintilian seems unlikely. This appeal to self-restraint in behaviour rather than art bears a closer resemblance to a line from Menander, Georgos fragment 3, a phrase that was sufficiently well-known (and sufficiently useful) to appear in Thomas Harbottle’s Dictionary of Quotations: Classical, first published in 1897 in London: The strongest man is he who loses not/ His self-control though he be foully wronged. However, this is scarcely definitive, and there are some more explicitly spiritual candidates for Vivekananda’s source – and conceivably also Jevons’ source. In a sermon preached at Holy Trinity Church, Brighton on 9th February 1851 on Colossians 3.15, the English divine Frederick W. Robertson declared: The next thing we observe respecting this peace is, that it is the manifestation of power – it is the peace which comes from an inward power: “Let the peace of God,” says the apostle, “rule within your hearts.” For it is a power, the manifestation of strength. There is no peace except there is the possibility of the opposite of peace, although now restrained and controlled... The real strength and majesty of the soul of man is calmness, the manifestation of strength.19 This is not a new idea, but the culmination of more than two millennia of Judeo-Christian sentiment, from Proverbs 16.32 (‘He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty’) via early Christian ideas on the virtue of makrothumia (patience, endurance, restraint) – doubtless with an admixture of Stoic ideas as well – to the ‘paradox of omnipotence’ discussed by Thomas Aquinas among others. The problem with the ‘Thucydides’ quote is that its sentiment is entirely conventional; if it is not expressed in its familiar form, it is impossible to trace with any certainty. Jevons may have been referencing Menander, or Quintilian, or even F.W. Robertson; he was then quoted without attribution by Smith, who was then misread by Lippmann – believing that Smith was quoting Thucydides is an entirely natural error, but failing to see that the quote referred to literary matters is either a spectacular misreading of the passage or the result of very poor note-taking. The Practical Cogitator then took up the task of disseminating Lippmann’s errors 17 Ibid. 10.2.73, 10.2.102. 18 Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume I: Karma Yoga (Calcutta, 11th edn 1962), p.31. 19 http://www.fwrobertson.com/sermons/ser54.htm, accessed 05/18/12. 6 (both the misattribution, and its application to public matters rather than rhetoric) as widely as possible, despite its editors’ admission that they couldn’t actually trace the reference. Colin Powell thus appears not as the originator of the misquotation, but as just another participant in a well-established tradition. 2. This is by no means the only spurious quotation attached to the name of Thucydides; it’s notable partly because it’s one of the few to have been clearly exposed as such, undoubtedly because it was so closely associated with a prominent individual in world affairs. The process of attributing statements to Thucydides that he never actually wrote began at a very early stage, in the thirdcentury CE Ars Rhetorica traditionally attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus: The contact with manners then is education; and this Thucydides appears to assert when he says history is philosophy learned from examples.20 Thucydides, of course, says nothing of the sort, and it is a fairly tendentious interpretation of his project; it sounds more like the way that an admirer of Thucydides might respond to the criticisms that Aristotle had levelled against history (Poetics 1451b11), by arguing that the study of ‘what Alcibiades did and suffered’ could nevertheless yield understanding of more general philosophical principles. In books of quotations and on the internet, the line is invariably truncated to the final phrase, and is as often attributed to Thucydides as it is to Dionysius (as well as, in one instance, to Thomas Carlyle).21 Some published reference works like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations devote time and resources to checking their sources, so the quotations they offer are generally reliable and usually provided with references to the original text; this is a key part of their claim to authoritative status, and they loudly advertise the fact.22 This is less true of other, more popular and/or cheaper works, especially those that cannibalise other anthologies to gather together words of wisdom on themes such as politics; it is still less true of the internet as a whole. The proliferation of electronic information and effective but undiscriminating search tools has brought about a step change in the dissemination of pseudo-Thucydideana, not only through the endless recycling of the same information in ‘Great Quotations’ sites, essay banks and blogs, but also through the use of the internet for research by or on behalf of actors with a greater public presence and/or claim to authority – whose adoption of doubtful quotations in speeches and writings then gives those lines and attributions a veneer of authority.23 Take for example the epigram that introduced the House Armed Services Committee’s 2010 report on professional military education, clearly intended to encapsulate the committee’s approach to the subject: ‘The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its 20 Ps.-Dionysius, Ars Rhetorica XI.2. 21 In the Chambers Dictionary of Quotations, ed. U. McGovern (Edinburgh, 2005), p. 192. 22 Nevertheless, Bartlett’s did until 1968 attribute ‘What is this day supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent’ to Thucydides (‘Annals XI.24’) rather than Tacitus, and persists in assigning quotes related to the death of Nicias and the failure of the Sicilian Expedition to Book VIII rather than Book VII. 23 The process of ‘citogenesis’ perfectly captured by the xkcd webcomic: http://xkcd.com/978/. 7 thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. Thucydides’.24 In fact this line comes from a nineteenth-century biography of Gordon of Khartoum by one William Butler, with no reference to Thucydides at all: ‘The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.’25 When quoted in this precise form, the remark is correctly attributed to Butler every time – including in the 1989 Skelton Report on military education, the predecessor of the 2010 report26 – although the webpage of a security consultation firm includes both this version and the variant attributed to Thucydides without noticing any problem.27 By December 2002, however, we find a blogger correcting the Butler version on the grounds that it comes originally from Thucydides, which suggests that the spurious attribution had become prevalent. The line was quoted by US Army Secretary Pete Geren in a commissioning address in 2007, which may have played a role in its replacing Butler’s version in official reports on military education.28 As well as that obvious context, the line is deployed to express support for the military against criticism by elitist civilians, and also appears in a widely-cited guide to software design, as a plea for companies not to ‘schism’ their designers and engineers.29 Another ‘Thucydides’ quotation has featured in discussions of such varied topics as housing rights and the control of methamphetamine abuse, and has acquired a new lease of life recently in comments on the sovereign debt crisis in Greece: ‘Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are injured’. 30 The line in fact comes from ancient accounts of the life of Solon: ‘When he was asked how men could be most effectually deterred from committing injustice, he said, “If those who are not injured feel as much indignation as those who are.”’ (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers I.59); ‘Being asked, namely, what city was best to live in, “That city,” he replied, “in which those who are not wronged, no less than those who are wronged, exert themselves to punish the wrongdoers.”’ (Plutarch, Solon 18.5). The earliest appearance of this maxim that I have found so far (at this date still correctly attributed) is in a legal journal in 1955, which may help account for its long life as a discussion point on legal principles.31 Since then, however, Solon has scarcely been mentioned; 24 Another Crossroads? Professional Military Education Two Decades After the Goldwater-Nichols Act and the Skelton Panel: http://democrats.armedservices.house.gov/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=d4748d4a-b358-49d7-8c9aaa0ba6f581a6, p.vii. April 2010: accessed 03/18/12. 25 W.F. Butler, Charles George Gordon (London, 1889), p. 84. 26 Report of the Panel on Military Education, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/congress/skelton1989/skelton.pdf, p.18. April 1989: accessed 03/18/12 27 http://protectionelite.com/quotes/index.html Accessed 03/18/12. 28 http://www3.davidson.edu/cms/x33280.xml Accessed 03/18/12. 29 http://www.ag.state.nd.us/methsummit/communitypreventionstrategiestoaddressmeth-colleencopple.pdf; http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/be-a-designer/ Accessed 03/18/12. 30 See for example http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/jason-manolopoulos-you-can-blame- the-greeks-ndash-but-they-have-been-betrayed-by-their-leaders-2299318.html Accessed 03/18/12 31 The Legal Aid Briefcase, Vols. 14-16 (1955), p.10. 8 instead the line, in different forms, is attributed to Benjamin Franklin (in the form ‘Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are’; c.96,000 results on Google), Thucydides (about 27,000 results) and, on one occasion, Socrates. Less prevalent on the internet, but found in a number of collections of military quotations, is ‘The strength of an army lies in strict discipline and undeviating obedience to its officers’, generally attributed to Thucydides (occasionally to Anonymous) and sometimes specifically to Book II. Nowhere is it linked to what seems to be its genuine source, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: ‘For the power by which the people are to be defended consisteth in their armies; and the strength of an army, in the union of their strength under one command’.32 The close association of Thucydides and Hobbes – less the fact that Hobbes’ first published book was a translation of Thucydides than the tendency for the two of them to be bracketed together as precursors of ‘Realism’ in international relations and strategic thought – may account for this misattribution.33 It should be noted that it is equally possible for a genuine Thucydides quote to be attributed to someone else; the view that ‘Few things are brought to a successful issue by impetuous desire, but most by calm and prudent forethought’ is more often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte (c.5,700 results) than to Thucydides (c.3,900 results), but is in fact C.T. Ramage’s 1864 rendition of VI.13.34 However, this is the only example I have found so far – unless we count the attribution on one occasion of the spurious quotation about power and restraint to Ronald Reagan.35 Thucydides is more often given credit for the ideas of others than quoted without proper acknowledgement. There seem to be two prerequisites for this practice. The first is a ‘strong’ idea of the supposed author, in conjunction with a relatively weak idea of the actual author. This rests on knowledge of the former’s existence – it is quite understandable that one might think of Thucydides (or Socrates, or Benjamin Franklin) as the coiner of a memorable phrase over the relatively obscure figures of Solon or Butler – and knowledge, however vague or superficial, of the sort of writer he or she is. He or she can thus appear as a plausible author for a remark on a particular subject – as Ralph Keyes sardonically remarked, ‘If a comment is saintly, it must have been made by Gandhi’.36 The ‘idea’ of Thucydides presents him as a hard-headed realist on matters of politics and war alike; his work offers so many genuine quotations on courage, discipline, tactics and the fortunes of war that he can appear as a likely candidate for any such stray dictum in search of an author. The most extreme example is the maxim that ‘A collision at sea can ruin your whole day’, ascribed to ‘Thucydides Book IX’ by a student at the Naval War 32 Hobbes, Leviathan II.xviii.12. The ‘Thucydides’ version is cited e.g. in R.D. Heinl Jr., ed., Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations (Annapolis, MD, 1966), p. 90 and P.G. Tsouras, ed., Warriors’ Words: a quotation book (London, 1992), p. 137. 33 On Hobbes and Thucydides, see Laurie M. Johnson (Bagby), Thucydides, Hobbes and the Interpretation of Realism (DeKalb IL, 1993). 34 Beautiful Thoughts from Greek Authors (London, 1864), p. 343. 35 By Majority Leader Staton of the West Virginia Legislature on 13 th September 2005. According to Hillel Schwartz, Reagen is a figure who is especially associated with misquotations and misattributions: ‘Commonplaces’, in The Threepenny Review 44 (1991), pp. 20-1. 36 ‘The Quote Verifier’, Antioch Review 64.2 (2006), pp. 256-66; quote from p. 258. 9 College in 1960 in response to the Thucydidean obsession of one of his lecturers (the phrase had appeared a few years earlier in the Air Force, not attributed to Thucydides) and taken up by the Reader’s Digest in 1962.37 Although the perpetrator confessed in 1971, and despite the fact that anyone who has actually read the History will know that it has only eight books, the misattribution has persisted, undoubtedly because the quote’s air of world-weary experience fits the popular contemporary image of Thucydides. Both the strength of the idea of a particular author and the conception of his or her work can clearly change over time; Thucydides was scarcely a significant figure in the fifteenth or even in the eighteenth century, and so unlikely to attract misattribution, while it is no longer plausible, for example, to attribute to Virgil magical powers or amatory escapades, as was common in the Middle Ages.38 The second prerequisite for misattribution might seem to be a lack of concern with authenticity and authentication; certainly this is Sharlin’s criticism of Colin Powell, that he failed adequately to question either his favourite quotation or the evidence for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. It might better be termed a lack of distrust, and a not unreasonable one; why should anyone (apart from congenitally sceptical academics) assume that a quotation in a perfectly respectable reference book must be fabricated unless proved otherwise? In either case, it should be noted that with Thucydides there is a further factor at work, namely the difficulty of authentication, even for those who wish to make the effort. His work is far too long for most people, even those who have read it carefully many times, to feel certain of recognising every single phrase. This is compounded by the issue of translation: genuine quotations can appear in many different forms (including thoroughly modern-looking ones: ‘war is the last thing in the world to go according to programme’39) and even appear completely spurious until one stumbles across the particular version that has entered the public domain – I was feeling increasingly certain that the maxim about impetuous desire versus forethought was indeed by Napoleon, until I came across Ramage’s collection of ancient wisdom, featuring his own translations for Thucydides. The situation is to some extent reminiscent of the anecdote from nineteenthcentury Prussia cited by Reinhart Koselleck, in which a discussion of financial policy is steered by the well-timed intervention of the Chancellor’s secretary: ‘’But Privy Councillor, do you not remember that Thucydides tells of the evils that followed from the circulation of too much paper money in Athens?’40 Thucydides is a figure of authority, recognised even – or especially – by those who have read little or nothing of his text, but are not prepared to admit this, and thus ideas and remarks quite alien to his work can become associated with his name and draw on his authority. However, with the exception of ‘a collision at sea can ruin your whole day’, there is no 37 The line appears as ‘attributed to Thucydides’ in Heinl’s Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations (pp. 56 and 208), indicating a degree of scepticism – but not enough for him to leave it out or attribute it to Anonymous instead. Further background on the precursors to and dissemination of the quote at http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/21/collision-at-sea/, accessed 03/18/12. 38 On ‘Vergil in the basket’ and other legends, see Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages (reprinted Princeton, 1997), pp.viii-ix. 39 This a loose but not inaccurate rendition of I.78, which appeared originally in John Morley’s Life of Gladstone (London, 1903), p. 544. 40 R. Koselleck, Futures Past: on the semantics of historical time (trans. K. Tribe, Chicago, 2004), p. 26. 10 trace of the deliberate creation of pseudo-Thucydideana; rather, misattributions are an accidental by-product of contemporary habits of quotation and the inevitable fallibility of memory. The disputed quotations are not those that feature in Bartlett and similar authoritative collections; those constitute an expensively-authenticated body of knowledge, easily checked but as a result extremely limited in scope. Clearly those collections contain only a small selection of all the genuine Thucydides quotations in existence; there is a substantial penumbra of other maxims and dicta of lesser status – over 120 different quotations from Thucydides have appeared in publications over the last century – many of which may be much more memorable and useful for particular purposes than the ‘establishment’ quotations, and where the boundary between the ‘genuine but less memorable’ and the ‘spurious but plausible’ runs the risk of disappearing completely. The development of the internet has created an aphoristic ecosystem, in which utility, memorability and apparent authority are more effective traits for survival and reproduction than authenticity; a symbiotic relationship with the name of Thucydides enables various quotes to survive that might otherwise have perished along with the names of their true authors, while at the same time Thucydides’ reputation is perpetuated through association with memorable and useful maxims, whether genuine or not. It is interesting to note that different versions of the same basic idea are often firmly associated with one attribution rather than another: Thucydides does not appear as the author of the ‘Franklin’ version of the ‘justice for Athens’ line, nor vice versa, while the correct Butler quote on scholars and warriors is usually correctly attributed, unlike its ‘Thucydidean’ variant. It is possible, clearly, for a line of descent to run true, with successive quotations preserving information about the original source; but at the same time mutations constantly occur, changing the wording or losing the trace of origin, and those mutations that incorporate the prolific Thucydides meme as well as being adapted for current usage become more widely disseminated as a result. The same process can account for the survival and proliferation of misquotations. One example is the early appearance of the well-known line from the Melian dialogue (in the version popularised by Richard Crawley’s translation) in the past rather than present tense, as ‘the strong did what they could and the weak suffered what they must’, although this reduces the scope of the quotation to a specific statement about fifth-century Greece rather than a general principle. This version first appeared in Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, as a paraphrase rather than a quote, then in Heinl’s 1966 collection of military quotations, which may account for its appearance in 2004 in the computer strategy game Rome: Total War and subsequent dissemination across the internet.41 However, the most important Thucydidean example is a version of II.43.4: ‘Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war.’ This quote appears on many websites from the United States associated with the military: the Officer Candidate Schools Foundation, various veterans’ organisations and support groups, tributes to individual servicemen, blogs by serving and former military personnel, and collections of useful quotations to mark military retirements.42 Tracing who first copied whom is a hopeless task. At some point in the process, however, the second sentence has become garbled, from ‘never decline the dangers of war’ (in Crawley’s version) or ‘do not weigh too nicely the perils of war’ (Jowett; from its phrasing, the most likely source of the confusion) to something with a significantly different meaning. Wikipedia has ‘do not shy away from the risks of war’, a phrase that gets just over 500 hits on Google; the version found 41 Arendt, On Revolution (London, 1963), p.3; Heinl, Dictionary, p. 102. 42 E.g. http://www.ocsfoundation.org/; http://army.togetherweserved.com; http://www.specialspeeches.com/military-retirement-toasts.html. Accessed 03/18/12. 11 on most of these websites, ‘do not take lightly the perils of war’, gets nearly 78,000. The more accurate rendition would not be any less suitable for the purposes of celebrating the role of the serviceman in a democratic society, but perhaps modern sensibilities prefer an emphasis on the risks of military service rather than on indifference to those risks. It may also be the case that the misquotation began life with a competitive advantage – appearing in a widely cited military publication, for example, though I haven’t yet identified it – but it has certainly proved far more successful in replicating itself than more authentic versions. 3. Even when the quotations involved are perfectly genuine, to encounter Thucydides in the form of a selection of maxims and dicta seems, at least to a classicist, distinctly odd. It is true that in the Renaissance, insofar as his work was read at all, Thucydides was often encountered through extracts and excerpts from key speeches and set piece descriptions, but since the early nineteenth century there has been a general assumption among specialists that his work needs to be read and understood as a whole.43 In a few cases, of course, such as ‘my history is a possession for all time’, we can well imagine that the line was intended by its author to be memorable in isolation from the rest of the text. In others, a short quotation is clearly intended to encapsulate for modern readers a more complex argument or interpretation on the part of Thucydides, rather than being expected to stand entirely on its own. This is the way in which many International Relations scholars understand their favourite line, ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’, as summarising – rather than constituting – Thucydides’ key contribution to Realist political theory. In the wider culture, however, Thucydides appears as the purveyor of timeless, decontextualised snippets of wisdom on matters political and military; the complexity of the text and the interdependence of its constituent elements are downplayed or ignored in favour of simplicity, memorability and utility. The prevalent view of modern classicists that Thucydides artfully crafted his text as a unified account (even if the revisions were incomplete), and intended it to be read as such, does not mean that this is the only acceptable way of approaching the work. It is a historically contingent claim, rather than a fact, that the ‘real’ Thucydides can only be understood and appreciated by following the entire thread of his narrative and thought to the end; Renaissance scholars clearly had quite different ideas of what constituted a proper and profitable reading strategy. Even if we take the view that such readings are inevitably limited and impoverished as readings of Thucydides – as political and rhetorical interventions they need to be judged by different criteria – that does not lessen their importance for the study of Thucydidean reception. On the contrary, the continued presence of Thucydides in contemporary discourse on political and military affairs must owe a great deal to the continuing practice of quoting his views, and the perceived power and relevance of those quotations. For most people, Thucydides is the author of a number of timeless and insightful maxims, and the various images of Thucydides derived from different selections of quotations are the chief constitutive elements of his image or images in modern culture. 43 Cf. Jean-Baptiste Gail’s lament that Thucydides is, in the great schools of Europe, known ‘only through extracts, I would almost say through scraps’ (Histoire grecque de Thucydide, volume IX (Paris, 1807), p. 1. Generally on readings of Thucydides in the Renaissance, Pade, Marianne 2006. ‘Thucydides’ Renaissance readers’, in Antonios Rengakos and Antonis Tsakmakis, eds., Brill’s Companion to Thucydides (Leiden and Boston, 2006), pp. 779-810. 12 Whereas certain authors have come to be defined by a small number of famous quotations, even a cursory survey of a range of reference works (twenty-one in all) and the internet reveals significant differences in the case of Thucydides between genres of publication and constituencies of citation. 125 different lines from Thucydides were quoted in total in this sample (in a few cases, particularly in Bartlett’s, a longer passage is quoted, incorporating several lines that are quoted separately in other publications). In the now largely defunct genre of anthologies of classical quotations, Thucydides naturally looms large: 46 quotes in Ramage’s Beautiful Thoughts from Greek Authors (1864), and 22 in Harbottle’s Dictionary of Quotations: classical (1897). Remarkably, these two lists overlap in only five places; there is clearly little sense of any canon of Thucydideana at this date.44 The second major genre is that of collections of military quotations, where Thucydides is praised equally as an expert on strategy and as someone who had experienced war in person (an explicit criterion for inclusion in one such collection, Tsouras’s Warrior’s Words). Heinl’s Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations has 26 quotes from Thucydides, Tsouras has 19, and T. Royle’s A Dictionary of Military Quotations (1990) 18. Again there is far less overlap than one might have expected; just one quotation (I.83.2: war is not an affair of arms but of money) appears in all three collections (and it does not appear in a fourth, J. Wintle’s The Dictionary of War Quotations (1989), which has only four quotations from Thucydides). 18 of Heinl’s quotes are unique to his volume, 15 of Royle’s are, and 10 of Tsouras’s; it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that each of them has read Thucydides and made his own selection independently, extracting what seemed useful or important, rather than relying on existing anthologies or a sense of what quotations were already in widespread use. Compared with these volumes, Thucydides has a significantly reduced presence in general anthologies and collections of political quotations; usually, there are just three or four quotations, if he appears at all. Nevertheless, at least one significant pattern can be identified in these works, establishing a contrast across both time and space. The first edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations in 1941 included four lines from Thucydides (a possession for ever, and three quotations from the Funeral Oration); subsequent editions left him out altogether. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, the equally respectable Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations has taken a very different approach. In the 9th edition of 1903, Thucydides appeared only twice, in footnotes (one of them spurious) to quotations from Plutarch – who was cited 178 times. In the 11th edition of 1937, four substantial quotations from the Funeral Oration were included; in the 13th edition of 1955, seven passages (still 156 from Plutarch), with five from the Funeral Oration; 12 quotes in the 14th edition (1968; Plutarch now down to 27), 12 in the 15th edition (1980), 14 in in 16th edition (1992) and 13 in the 17th edition (2002). This offers further evidence for the growing rather than diminishing role of Thucydides in public discourse in the United States from the Cold War, with General George Marshall’s 1947 claim that ‘I doubt seriously whether a man can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions regarding certain of the basic international issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens’45, to today. The question is how far Bartlett’s simply responded to a new intellectual climate, increasing the number of Thucydides quotations even as its coverage of other classical authors was significantly reduced to make way for more up-to-date quotations, and how far it played a supporting role in the process by making such quotations available to 44 They concur on the History as a possession for all time (I.83), on wars being won through money more than armaments (I.83), on wars springing from unseen causes (II.11), on the lack of shame in admitting poverty (II.40) and on the fact that all are prone to make mistakes (III.45). 45 Quoted by W.R. Connor, Thucydides (Princeton, 1984), p.3. 13 politicians, speech-writers and the general public. At least one piece of evidence points towards a reactive rather than proactive role; the well-known Richard Crawley rendition of the Melian Dialogue, ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’, for all its significance for twentieth-century international relations theory in the US, was not granted canonical status by Bartlett’s until 2002, precisely the period when it was being widely cited by journalists and other public commentators in the context of debates on the role of the United States as sole superpower. In fact, there seems to have been distinct uncertainty among Bartlett’s editors about which lines of Thucydides should be granted such status; rather than a core of essential quotations being gradually expanded, there was significant turnover between editions. Two of the four quotes in the 11th edition were dropped by the 13th, never to be reinstated; five of the seven quotes in the 13th edition fell out of the 14th (one was then restored in the 15th). The 15th edition dropped three (all of which were then restored in 1992); it restored one from 1955 and added two new ones, one of which was dropped immediately and the other two were abandoned in 2002. Just one quote appears in all editions since 1937 – ‘Our constitution is called a democracy...’ (II.37) – and just one appears in all editions since 1955 – ‘It may be that my history will seem less easy to read...’ (I.23). There is then greater continuity from 1968, with seven quotations appearing in successive editions – most of a distinctly martial flavour, from ‘The great wish of some is to avenge themselves on some particular enemy’ (I.141) and ‘They are surely to be esteemed the bravest spirits...’ (II.40) to ‘Happiness depends on being free...’ (II.43) and ‘Men make the city...’ (VII.77). Over half of the quotations that appear in one or other edition of Bartlett’s come from the Funeral Oration, reinforcing the impression that this is by far the bestknown and most serviceable section of Thucydides’ work in this period, but we can only speculate as to why different sentiments go in and out of fashion. For example, Pericles’ disparaging reference to ‘a woman’s greatest glory’ appears intermittently from 1968, precisely the time when, one would have thought, such a remark would have become clearly problematic and politicised. Looking across the whole sample of published sources, only three Thucydidean maxims are quoted by at least a third of them: ‘a possession for ever’, ‘not armaments but money’, and ‘famous men have the whole earth as a tomb’. If the bar is lowered to include lines quoted by at least a quarter of the sample (five different publications), another four quotes can be added – ‘our constitution is called a democracy’, ‘the bravest are surely those...’, ‘a woman’s greatest glory’ and ‘men make the city’ – but in all four cases the numbers are skewed by the fact that these quotes appear in two or more editions of Bartlett’s. If we turn to the internet for a sense of which Thucydidean maxims are currently in vogue, the picture becomes little clearer. Of these seven apparently significant quotations, only one (‘the bravest are surely those...’) appears in Thucydides’ Wikipedia entry at the time of writing; of the seven other quotations listed there, two are not found in any of the publications sampled, and two in just one, Ramage’s collection of Beautiful Thoughts. The Wikiquote page is far more comprehensive, with 64 Thucydides quotations, and even so it does not include ‘our constitution is called a democracy’, ‘famous men have the earth as a tomb’, ‘a woman’s greatest glory’ or ‘men make the city’; over half the quotations listed there appear in none of the published collections sampled, and nearly a quarter in just one of them (generally either Ramage or one of the anthologies of military quotations). It is difficult to escape the impression that that the Wikiquote page has been put together by a single individual reading through Thucydides and pulling out whatever took his or her fancy – not least because, in contrast to every other collection, it offers a substantial number of quotations from Books III-VIII rather than just the first two. www.goodreads.com offers about thirty different quotes, three of which (a possession for ever, not arms but money, and the whole earth a tomb) overlap with the list from published sources; www.quotationspage.com has six, of which one is 14 ‘the bravest are surely those...’; the twelve or so Thucydides quotes at thinkexist.com likewise include just that one example from the seven lines most prominent in published sources.46 One conclusion that can be drawn from this lack of any consistent pattern of quotation is that Thucydides has been seen as a generally authoritative figure offering significant thoughts on a wide range of themes, rather than as the purveyor of certain specific pieces of wisdom that are quoted again and again; this may explain the relative ease with which the maxims of other authors have become ascribed to him, if they match his established image. However, over the last decade or so there has been a distinct narrowing of the range of reference, with the emergence on the internet – not in Wikipedia or Wikiquote, but in the many sites that make no efforts to authenticate the lines they quote – of a clear canon of Thucydidean dicta. The same lines now appear on virtually every site (often in multiple versions): ‘the strong do what they can’; ‘the bravest are surely those...’; ‘the secret of happiness is freedom’, ‘superiority lies with those raised in the severest school’; ‘men naturally despise those who court them, but respect those who do not give way to them’. Almost as common are the pseudo-Thucydidean quotes on warriors and scholars and on justice coming to Athens, and one – ‘It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men’ – that is just about recognisable as a paraphrase of Cleon at III.37. These same lines are quoted regularly by journalists and bloggers, and used by a number of the latter as ‘signature blocks’, quoted beneath their name or alias every time they post a comment and thus expressing their adherence to a particular view of the world and set of values, in much the same way as a bumper sticker.47 The difference between an aphorism and a dictum, according to an essay by Gary Saul Morson, is that the former opens up a mystery to which there is no simple answer whereas the latter offers solutions and tells us that the world is not as complex as it appears.48 Much as I would have liked to entitle this essay ‘Thucydides the Aphorist’, quotations from his work are inevitably treated as dicta: they purport to explain the reality of the world and to establish axiomatic truths, insulated from history or complexity. These quotations are often presented as Thucydides’ own views, even when they originally appeared as the words of Pericles or Archidamus or Cleon; they are stripped of any of the associations that might attach to those historical figures, and instead given the full authority of the historian himself. They are also removed from the context of Thucydides’ narrative, that was often, arguably, designed to highlight the gap between such confident statements about the world and the way that events work out in practice.49 Statements intended to exemplify a false or corrupted perspective, such as Cleon’s views on democracy or the Athenians’ views of their empire, become authoritative statements about reality. Of course, as the history of reading Thucydides in International Relations theory demonstrates, it is entirely possible to reach such a view of his work from reading entire passages or even the whole text, but consuming Thucydides through the selection of quotations regularly found on the internet makes it more or less inevitable.50 46 All websites accessed on 4/5/12. 47 Cf. C.W. Gardner, Bumper Sticker Wisdom: America’s pulpit above the tailpipe (Hillsboro OR, 1995). 48 ‘The aphorism: fragments from the breakdown of reason’, New Literary History 34 (2003), pp. 409-29. 49 Cf. Tim Rood, Thucydides: narrative and explanation (Oxford, 1998) and Carolyn Dewald, Thucydides’ War Narrative: a structural study (Berkeley, 2005). 50 Cf. Welch, D. ‘Why International Relations theorists should stop reading Thucydides’, Review of International Studies, 29(2) (2003), pp. 301-319 15 Not only the popularity of particular maxims but also the kinds of knowledge and understanding that Thucydides is believed to offer have changed over time. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he was treated above all as a source of moral principles and guidance for individuals. C.N. Douglas’ 1917 anthology Forty Thousand Quotations, which groups them under themes, draws on Thucydides for Ignorance, Boasting, Impatience and Envy. Ramage’s Beautiful Thoughts organises its entries by author, but gives each one a suitable heading; for Thucydides, these include Envy, Poverty, Adversity, Prudent Measures, ‘Make Allowance for Chance in Everything’ and ‘All Men Are Sinners’.51 As that last heading might suggest, this approach at times requires some creative translation. ‘All men are sinners’ is his rendering of III.45 (‘all are by nature prone to error’), while II.64 (‘To be hateful and offensive has ever been at the time the fate of those who have aspired to empire’, in Jowett’s version) is convertedby Ramage into a statement about social behaviour and the problems faced by the superior sort: ‘to be an object of hatred and aversion to their contemporaries has been the usual fate of all those whose merit has raised them above the common level’. By the middle of the twentieth century, Thucydides was conceived instead as a figure commenting on public life rather than personal morality: anthologies that organise their quotations around themes cite him under death and the dead, money, fame, fanaticism, and, most obviously, war, but it is clear from the selection of quotations in non-thematic anthologies above all the dominance of the Funeral Oration, on ideas of democracy and the relationship between citizen and state – that he is also seen as concerned with political life. We might imagine that this reflects a demand for different kinds of knowledge, for different purposes; the means of understanding a complex world This public, political Thucydides endures in the lines that are most frequently cited in Congress; of the sixty or so times Thucydides was mentioned between 1990 and 2010, two-thirds involved the Funeral Oration.52 On the internet, however, the dominant image of Thucydides is rather that of the prophet of strength, intransigence, and power, of the superiority of courage and martial values. At its best, he is used to underpin and legitimise a noble idea of the role of the military in a democratic society, but that seems to shade too easily into the sense that the defence of freedom is about the right to bear arms and the right to use force if necessary to compel obedience from other countries – that the world is as the quoted Thucydides appears to have described it, a place where strength and determination are the only significant factors to be considered. 4. As we have seen, however, there are many other ideas of Thucydides that could be cited, drawing on the power of his name and reputation to support a different vision of politics or a different agenda for foreign affairs. The usual response by those opposed to ‘Neo-Realist’ or ‘Neoconservative’ readings of Thucydides has been to argue for a more nuanced and detailed reading of the text in place of a few decontextualised and misinterpreted maxims, but such a response – however historically and philologically credible within academic circles – is entirely inadequate in the face of the rhetorical power of ‘bumper sticker philosophy’ in the sphere of 51 Ramage also has some more descriptive headings, such as Calamities of War and How a State can Preserve Itself – and two versions of ‘Character of British Nation Foreshadowed’. 52 I am extremely grateful to Liz Sawyer for the opportunity to draw on her research on this topic. 16 public discourse.53 Another approach might be to find some equally persuasive alternative slogans, to turn the power of the idea of Thucydides against its usual appropriators. At the end of February 2012, General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared before a House committee hearing and was asked to justify his assertion that Iran was a rational actor and hence that sanctions and diplomacy were the most effective means for preventing the Iranians acquiring nuclear weapons. DEMPSEY: I stand by [that remark] because the alternative is almost unimaginable. The alternative is that we attribute to them that their actions are so irrational that they have no basis of planning. You know, not to sound too academic about it but Thucydides in the fifth century B.C. said that all strategy is some combination of reaction to fear, honor and interests. And I think all nations act in response to one of those three things, even Iran. The key is to understand how they act and not trivialize their actions by attributing to them some irrationality. I think that’s a very dangerous thing for us to do. 54 Whether this is a wholly persuasive interpretation is open to dispute: fear and honor can both be seen as thoroughly irrational motives, and Thucydides’ point in I.75 is that humans are predictable rather than that they are rational. 55 Once again, the highest-ranking military officer in the United States turned to Thucydides as an authoritative source on the state of the world, but this time in the cause of avoiding a hasty resort to war – and, perhaps just as important to classicists, with an authentic quotation. 53 On the academic response to appropriations of Thucydides in International Relations debates, see Richard Ned Lebow, ‘International relations and Thucydides’, in K. Harloe & N. Morley, eds., Thucydides in the Modern World: reception, reinterpretation and influence (Cambridge, 2012). 54 http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/03/01/435346/dempsey-iran-rational-actor/?mobile=nc 55 It does seem to reflect current trends in military thinking: see Colin S. Gray, ‘The 21st century security environment and the future of war’, Parameters, Winter 2008-9, pp. 14-26. 17