Sphinx

Just a short post, as I am still trying and failing to finish revising a conference paper for publication (am now in the phase of, “well, the final revised extended deadline was actually Friday, but no one works at the weekend, probably, and with a bit of luck they’ll have other emails to deal with first thing tomorrow so maybe I have until lunchtime” – cf. http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1815), but I just wanted to comment on a few points raised by the ongoing adventures of the Thucydiocy Bot, dedicated to the never-ending and entirely pointless task of correcting misquotations of Thucydides on Twitter. One is the tenacity with which some people stick to the idea that Thucydides came up with their favourite quotation, even when the real author has been firmly identified. “Jevons aside, give me an alternative source,” demanded one, after the Bot had noted that Colin Powell’s favourite “Of all manifestations of power…” line wasn’t attributed to Thucydides until the 1940s, but was used half a century earlier by a classicist writing about historiographical style. Huh? Give you an alternative source for the quote that isn’t the man who actually wrote it? Failure to do so clearly means that it must be Thucydides… Even sadder was someone else’s reluctance to credit George Santayana with the “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it” aphorism; true, it is a bit like Thucydides’ “events tend to repeat themselves which is why history is useful” – but the message is quite different, and poor old Santayana doesn’t get credit for anything much these days (apart from the guitar solo on Black Magic Woman) so why begrudge him this?

The utterly dominant quote on Twitter, appearing (in a wide variety of misspellings – I did like “the secret of sappiness”) at least five or six times a day, is the Crawley version of Pericles’ great claim that “the secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage”, with or without the final point in its correct (“therefore don’t shy away from the dangers of war” or incorrect (“therefore don’t take too lightly the dangers of war”) versions – mostly without. One can understand why; it’s a line that’s adaptable to more or less any situation, and tends, at least in this translation, to fail the test that if the opposite sounds nonsensical (“the secret of happiness is imprisonment, and the secret of freedom is cowardice”) then it probably isn’t actually saying very much. But today I’ve come across an alternative version, a bizarre mutation of the original that echoes the form of the Crawley line but apparently substitutes completely different words: “Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.” Yes, very motivational; it does seem to reverse the whole intent of the sentiment (self-control as the means to self-respect – huh? – as the means to courage, rather than courage as the means to freedom as the means to happiness), and it does seem significantly less Thucydidean in its tone – not least because it is impossible to imagine any way of adding the final clause (“don’t shy away from war”) in any way that makes sense. Where on earth has this version come from? Some sort of Chinese whispers?

UPDATE: Found it! The self-control line turns out to be more or less the version of 1.84.3 offered by Smith’s 1919 Loeb translation. It didn’t show up on previous searches largely because I got bored after the first eight pages of Personal Development Quotes webpages, and because the quote isn’t completely identical. It does once again emphasise the difficulty of authenticating quotes, when different translations can render Thucydides’ Greek so differently…