Sphinx

No, I haven’t seen the new Wonder Woman film – the reviews I’ve seen so far seem inclined to a position of “crashing disappointment” [ahem. see update below] – but I think I’ve managed to establish the identity of the alleged Thucydides reference without actually having to watch it. I’ve no idea how it plays out in the film, as the screenplay doesn’t seem to be online yet, but as far as the novelisation is concerned, Diana is busy getting smoochy with General Ludendorff, whom she suspects of being the god Ares in disguise…

“Enjoying the party?” Ludendorff asked her.

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “I confess I’m not sure what we’re celebrating tonight.”

“A German victory, of course,” he said with relish.

“Victory?” she echoed. “When I hear peace is so close?” He smiled. “Peace is only an armistice in an endless war.”

It was a famous quotation. Her heart turned over in her chest. She understood what he was saying. And whose words he was using to say them:

“Thucydides,” she replied, referring to the Greek general who had written about the long, terrible war between the Spartans and the Greeks. Mnemosyne, Diana’s last tutor, had forced her to memorize long passages of his work. She had told Diana that Thucydides was one of Hippolyta’s favorites – and by that she meant both the work and the man.

“You know your Ancient Greeks,” he said. “They understood that War is a God. A God that requires human sacrifice.”

Unfortunately, as I discussed in a previous blog post, this line doesn’t actually come from Thucydides; the earliest attribution to him that I’ve yet been able to find is from 1988, when it was painted on one of the walls of the newly-refurbished West Point museum, as one of a set of quotations suggested by the local history department. It does resemble a Napoleon quote (or at least a quote attributed to Napoleon), and much further back it bears a significant resemblance to a line in Plato’s Laws (626a). But Thucydides, as the great realist and historian of war, is so much more appropriate as the source.

In the context of this scene in Wonder Woman, this is in one sense perfect: it instantly reveals that Ludendorff cannot possibly be a genuine Prussian general. Just like the moment in Jo Walton’s The Philosopher Kings when Kebes sings a version of Summertime, it’s clear evidence that supernatural agency is involved; only a god like Ares could know about a fake Thucydides quote from seventy years in the future…

On the other hand, Diana is convinced that she recognises the line, and its author – although, since she also seems to think that the Peloponnesian War was between the Spartans and ‘the Greeks’, we probably don’t need to take her claims to knowledge too seriously [ahem; see update below]. What’s the point in having a magic lasso of truth if you don’t use it for anything useful? Unless she doesn’t bother taking pains to enquire into things or develop any sort of critical sense because she can always have resort to a magical gizmo.

It does all fit with the sense that Thucydides continues to have a worryingly high presence in the wider culture: the prevalence of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ meme with the publication now of Graham Allison’s book-length account, more references from Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull, the recent burst of hyper-crude realism from H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn in the Wall Street Journal on Trump’s foreign policy ‘strategy’ (not directly citing Thuc, admittedly), and the response from David Brooks in the New York Times that he wishes McMaster was a better student of Thucydides.

But all those examples relate to the specific field of international relations, and Thucydides functions there as a kind of status symbol; it’s not that everyone is expected to have heard of him, but that he’s someone you ought to be familiar with if you want to be taken seriously. The Wonder Woman reference feels different, not least because I thought the whole point of the modern blockbuster was to be as non-culturally-specific and accessible as possible. The quote isn’t expected to be familiar (it’s the sort of thing a villainous Prussian general might say), but when Diana recognises it as Thucydides, that’s a signal to the audience – or at least intended to be: exotic, perhaps, but recognisable.

It is perhaps worth noting that Joss Whedon’s original screenplay for Wonder Woman didn’t misquote any Thucydides…

Update 5/6/17, on the basis of various recent conversations. Firstly, apologies to anyone who felt I was being gratuitously unfair to the character of Diana (views not to be taken seriously etc.) when this is clearly an issue with the author of the novelisation (and not the screenplay or the film, which doesn’t say anything about the different sides in the Peloponnesian War) attributing idiotic ideas to her that no genuine Amazon would actually hold. Secondly, it does seem that the reviews I saw may have been less than representative (and maybe too heavily invested in some of the original comics), as generally the film is being well received, and my pedantic quibbling on the specific issue of a dodgy Thucydides reference shouldn’t be held against it.

Thirdly, I’ve had a fascinating exchange with Nick Lowe from Royal Holloway, who was the Greek translator for the film; he comments on how seriously the filmmakers took the idea of Diana as speaker of a hundred languages and wanted to get the lines right, and also suggests a possible rationalisation for the ‘Thucydides’ line:

This film is evidently set in a world which is not ours, as witness the fact that Ludendorff dies twenty years early (for most people a rather more glaring licence than a bit of internet-approved pseudothucydideana), or maybe a copy of Thucydides book 9 in his daughter’s own hand survived in the library of Themyscira…

But of course; and if both Ares and Diana have access to passages of Thucydides not available to anyone else, that offers two different routes whereby that line might have found its way onto the walls of the West Point museum…

Update 6/6/17: I haven’t yet managed to track down a specific reference to this line in Ludendorff’s own works (see comment from Jonathan below), as there doesn’t seem to be an electronic copy of the English version anywhere and the German version is in Fraktur and so word searches refuse to cooperate. However, random Googling has, besides confirming that this line was cited (without any link to Thucydides) quite widely in the 1940s as a means of characterising the German idea of Total War, come up with an interesting new variant, from the rantings of one Andrew (or Andreas) Smolnikar, a Catholic apostate and Millennial prophet, in 1859:

In those volumes as well as in all my following publications it is made evident that Peace can never be established on the globe in the present course of political and ecclesiastical affairs, and that, what they call peace, is only an armistice, during which the dragon and his host are inspiring the governments to amass means for new eruptions of revolutions and wars.

From Secret Enemies of True Republicanism: MOST IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS REGARDING THE INNER LIFE OF MAN AND THE SPIRIT WORLD, IN ORDER TO ABOLISH REVOLUTIONS AND WARS AND TO ESTABLISH PERMANENT PEACE ON EARTH, ALSO: THE PLAN FOR REDEMPTION OF NATIONS FROM MONARCHICAL AND OTHER OPPRESIVE SPECULATIONS AND FOR THE INTRODUCTION OF THE PROMISED NEW ERA OF HARMONY, TRUTH AND RIGHTEOUSNESS ON THE WHOLE GLOBE. Springhill, PA, Peace Union Centre, 1859. Sooo, Biblical reference now..?

Yes, this is a completely irrelevant rabbit-hole, but Smolnikar seems to be a fascinating character: former Benedictine monk and professor of biblical studies in Austria who became convinced that he’d been called to inaugurate the ‘Universal Republic of Peace’ in the US; emigrated 1837, founded his own Peace-Union settlement in Pennsylvania, published five volumes of his revelations. (see here). All part of the wider Fourier movement.

Update 6/6/17: okay, I really must stop reading far-out End Times websites that claim to incorporate WW1, WW2 and the Arab-Israeli conflict into their interpretations of Daniel and Revelation. If anyone actually feels confident that they can think of a specific biblical antecedent for the ‘peace is just an armistice in a never-ending war’ idea, rather than just wibblings about the Fifth and Sixth Trumpets, please let me know…

Update 10/6/17: still trying to chase up possible biblical connections – there seems to be a vague possibility that Augustine, who writes things about just war and the like, may have said something relevant – but key thing to note is that novelisation of Wonder Woman film does open with a *genuine* Thucydides quote, the one about the bravest being those who have the clearest vision of glory and danger and still go charging in.

Update 20/6/17: I’ve just added the picture at the top of the article, taken from the webpage of the a Belfer Center at Harvard as part of the ongoing publicity campaign for Graham Allison’s Destined for War. The whole idea of “Thucydides’s Trap” is basically a marketing tool, so it seems entirely appropriate that they’re now grabbing the coat tails of Wonder Woman‘s success. “Wonder Woman thinks she knows Thucydides. That’s the script writers’ fault; what’s our excuse?”

Update 21/6/17: they’re going all out with the self-promotion on Twitter – the poster above has been tweeted by both Allison and Niall Ferguson with comments to the effect of “popular movie character thinks you should read this book!” Is it wise to advertise something supposedly derived from Thucydides by hitching one’s wagon to a bit of pseudo-Thucydideana? Do they care?