Sphinx

“We are either kings among men, or the pawns of kings”: Thucydides. Or not. It’s the first time I’ve seen this one on the Twitter, and it’s easy to track down its immediate source: Smallville, season 5 episode 10, Lex Luthor speaking: “Thucydides said, ‘We are either kings among men… or the pawns of kings.'” January 2006, so it’s actually surprising this hasn’t surfaced before. More interesting is the origin of the quote, which certainly isn’t anything to do with Thucydides. Various internet sources attribute a variant to Napoleon Bonaparte: “In this life we are either kings or pawns, emperors or fools.” Doesn’t appear to be authentic – and quite a lot of the citations note that this actually comes from the 2002 film of The Count of Monte Cristo, except that there it recurs in several different, shortened versions – “In life, we’re all either kings or pawns”; “Kings and pawns, Marchand. Emperors and fools”; “We are kings or pawns, a man once said” – that someone has drawn together into a single line. No trace of this in the original Dumas novel, so it does indeed seem to have been invented for the film, and elevated to a sort of theme. Really not the sort of thing that either Napoleon or Thucydides would say…

Incidentally, this month I’ve started recording the identities of the accounts that tweet the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote, and issuing final warnings – well, it’s the last time I’m going to bother to warn them – to those I’ve definitely seen before. Ten so far, all except one being some sort of marketing service bot, lifestyle advertiser, ‘get rich quick’ guru or the like. One very familiar face turns out to be the CEO of Social Jukebox, an automated social network management tool (translation: nonsense-tweeting bot to gather followers for marketing purposes), and I rather suspect that this is to blame for much of the activity around this quote. The one exception is @TradBritGroup, the account of the Traditional Britain Group, which seems to be devoted to the non-automated tweeting of right-wing nonsense in order to gather followers against political correctness and enforced multiculturalism… But they haven’t responded to my correction either.