‘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