Saturday night was Berlin’s Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften (‘Long Night of the Sciences’), where all the different institutions of research and higher education open their doors to the public for exhibitions, workshops, seminars and lectures – apparently over 25,000 people took part this year, so clearly this is a pretty spectacular bit of public engagement. I was actually busy having dinner (and a very nice Chateau Latour) with a colleague that evening, but did make a small contribution to the exhibition being staged by the TOPOI research cluster (where I’m currently a research fellow for two months) on ‘War and Peace in the Ancient World’, supplementing their display of ancient quotations on the theme of peace with yet another choice example of Pseudo-Thucydideana.
“Peace is an armistice in a war that is continuously going on.”
Der antike griechische Geschichtsschreiber Thukydides beschrieb den Kampf der Athener und Spartaner und ihrer Verbündeten zwischen 431 und 404 v.Chr, Ereignisse, die er selbst erlebte. Einige Zeitgenossen glaubten, dass es sich dabei um mehrere verschiedene Kriege handelte, die durch den sogenannten Nikias-Frieden (421-414) voneinander getrennt waren. Thukydides jedoch argumentierte, dass über die gesamte Zeit hinweg ein einziger, großer Krieg stattfand, wobei es zeitweise keinen offenen Konflikt zwischen den großen Kontrahenten gab. Der französische Poliktikwissenschaftler Raymond Aron schlug (nicht als einziger) vor, dass wir den Zeitraum 1914-1945 ähnlich beurteilen sollen.Moderne Diskussionen über internationale Beziehungen und Weltpolitik greifen gern auf Thukydides als Begründer des sogenannten ‘Realismus’ zurück: jemand, der sich keinen Illusionen über die Welt hingeben wollte.
Das Problem dabei ist leider: häufig wird er schlicht falsch zitiert, ohne genaue Referenz.Dies ist auch hier der Fall. Thukydides war tatsächlich der Auffassung, daβ der Nikias-Frieden lediglich eine Pause im offenen Kampf war („daß das nicht wohl Frieden heißen darf“), aber er verwendete nie die ihm im obigen Zitat zugeschriebenen Worte – und mit Sicherheit hatte er keine allgemeine Aussage im Sinn, daβ letztlich jeder Frieden nichts als ein Waffenstillstand sei. Viele aber zitieren Thukydides – bzw. das, wovon sie glauben, es stehe bei Thukydides –, ohne sein Werk vorher zu lesen; sie wissen allein, dass er eine (womöglich die) historische Autorität ist, von großer Bedeutung für die Gegenwart.
It’s the usual problem with Thucydides quotes: it looks perfectly plausible, with just the right tone of rational scepticism and cynicism, and it expressed an idea which certainly is found in Thucydides’ discussion of the peace of Nicias and his idea that the thirty years of the Peloponnesian Wars should be treated as a single whole rather than as several separate conflicts (which, as I note, was an idea that Raymond Aron then applied to the period 1914-45). The problem is that I can’t find any trace of this precise quotation in any translation of Thucydides – and, interestingly, it doesn’t appear in any of the books of quotations, even military quotations, that I studied for my Arion article on the subject a couple of years ago, which is why I haven’t researched it before. It now seems to be quite widespread on the internet and in certain publications, but this is quite a recent development. The earliest definite attribution to Thucydides that I’ve found so far is actually in the ‘History of Warfare’ gallery in the West Point Museum, which includes quotations painted on the walls that were, so I am informed, supplied by members of the History Department in 1988 when the gallery was refurbished. None of those involved are still around, so I haven’t made any headway in finding out why someone thought this was a suitable quotation and why they thought it was from Thucydides.
One possible source of the actual quotation – and this isn’t a new phenomenon – is Napoleon, who is said to have remarked, at the time of the Peace of Amiens (1802) between France and Britain, that “In the present state of affairs every peace treaty means no more than a brief armistice; and I believe that my destiny will be to fight almost continuously” (quoted in a C19 Life). Now, there is no guarantee that Napoleon actually said this, and no guarantee that he hadn’t taken in from Thucydides either directly or indirectly – as I’ve discussed, each of these has had quotes attributed to the other. Whoever first came up with the idea, it’s clearly a powerful and useful one – at least for the born pessimist – that has to be matched up with some sufficiently weighty authority to be fully effective…
[Thanks as ever to Ben Earley for tracing the Napoleon quote.]
Sphinx 
A good example of how great Twitter can be for this sort of investigation; Iain McDaniel has noted the resemblance to the comments of Clinias in Plato’s Laws (626a) talking of Cretan customs: “And herein, as I think, he condemned the stupidity of the mass of men in failing to perceive that all are involved ceaselessly in a lifelong war against all States. If, then, these practices are necessary in war,—namely, messing in common for safety’s sake, and the appointment of relays of officers and privates to act as guards,— they must be carried out equally in time of peace. For (as he would say) “peace,” as the term is commonly employed, is nothing more than a name, the truth being that every State is, by a law of nature, engaged perpetually in an informal war with every other State.” So, not by any stretch of the imagination a uniquely Thucydidean idea (and indeed T. is referring to a specific peace in a specific war, rather than this sort of general, neo-Realist ‘world is anarchy’ conception).
Also suddenly thought of the title of the David Hare play, ‘The Absence of War’ – though I am pretty sure that comes from Spinoza, despite the attempts of various poets and mystics on the internet to claim it for themselves.
Worth adding, I think, that the fact this quote as used today is elevated into a general principle of international relations rather than referring to a specific historical event *doesn’t* automatically refute a Thucydides connection – any number of genuine quotations from his work are ‘generalised’, turned into maxims with universal reference, in this way. The idea of Thucydides as all-powerful authority on war and inter-state relations is now so well established that he is expected to have talked in an appropriate manner, producing such words of wisdom, glossing over the amount of work that IR readers have had to put in to identify any sort of ‘theory’ in his work whatsoever…