Sphinx

As the flight from Bristol to Edinburgh arrives, let alone leaves, at ungodly o’clock, I had lots of time to kill before giving a paper to their research seminar last week. I spent a chunk of it in the Edinburgh Central Library, browsing their collection of Books of Quotations, as one current minor project involves seeing how, and how often, Thucydides gets quoted in different contexts. Interesting (or interesting to me, at any rate) observation #1: more of the quotes found online are genuine, or at least not completely fake, than I initially thought, but they don’t half choose some dodgy translations. Interesting observation #2: the first two editions of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations had four (very obvious) quotations from Thucydides, which were then dropped from the third edition in 1979; Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, arguably the US equivalent, had just a couple in 1941, but expanded it to 13 in the 1960s and still further by the 1990s. Given that the entries for most ancient authors were being cut back in the same period, to make room for more contemporary quotations, this seems to tell us something significant about Thucydides and his place in modern American life. And that’s before we get onto the contemporary indie band producing a song entitled Thucydides II.58. Why II.58???