Sphinx

Democracies are always at their best when things seem at their worst. (Thucydides)

Alongside all the obviously false and/or completely unverifiable ‘Thucydides’ quotations to be encountered on the Twitter, there is a minor strand of what could be called ‘misleading paraphrases’, where someone quotes someone else’s summary of what Thucydides said as if it were Thucydides’ own words. I’ve previously discussed the Henry Kissinger version of 1.22.4 – “The present, while never repeating the past exactly, must inevitably resemble it. Hence, so must the future” – which Niall Ferguson and Graham Allison seem to have successfully launched as a genuine quotation. Yesterday I came across the quote above for the first time, a line which likewise looks not completely implausible but nevertheless wrong. And so it proved…

A quick Google of the phrase immediately reveals its source: John R. Hale‘s Lords of the Sea: the epic story of the Athenian navy and the birth of democracy (2010) – which also, slightly oddly, appears with alternative subtitles: how trireme battles changed history and how the Athenian navy changed the world. This offers an old-fashioned narrative of the rise of Athens, including the following account of the aftermath of the Syracuse disaster:

The prestige of Athenian democracy suffered with the failure of the Sicilian expedition, but Alcibiades and the rest of the Greeks overestimated the disaster’s impact. In this supreme crisis the Assembly rallied swiftly. Timber was found and new ships built. To retrench, the Athenians called in the triremes and troops from distant outposts. Messengers were sent to Athenian garrisons in allied cities, warning them that the Spartans could back oligarchic coups. All these steps were taken over the winter. When the historian Thucydides recorded the people’s energetic response, he observed that democracies are always at their best when things seem at their worst.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. True, the Athenians did not instantly collapse, and they did take these various actions, but this is a remarkably positive reading of events, as is clear when we compare it with what’s actually set out in Thucydides 8.1 (which is the source Hale gives for the paraphrased remark). In the first place, it passes over Thucydides’ account of how the Athenians actually responded to the news:

The Athenians could not believe that the armament had been so completely annihilated, although they had the positive assurances of the very soldiers who had escaped from the scene of action. At last they knew the truth; and then they were furious with the orators who had joined in promoting the expedition —as if they had not voted it themselves—and with the soothsayers, and prophets, and all who by the influence of religion had at the time inspired them with the belief that they would conquer Sicily. Whichever way they looked there was trouble; they were overwhelmed by their calamity, and were in fear and consternation unutterable. The citizens and the city were alike distressed; they had lost a host of cavalry and hoplites and the flower of their youth, and there were none to replace them. And when they saw an insufficient number of ships in their docks, and no crews to man them, nor money in the treasury, they despaired of deliverance. (8.1.1-2)

So, not exactly the ‘keep calm and carry on’ spirit that Hale ascribes to them; rather, a quick hysterical search for scapegoats, conveniently forgetting their own responsibility for the whole shambles. As for the claim that their reaction showed democracy at its best, refusing to be cowed by adversity, what Thucydides actually said was that “after the manner of a democracy, they were very amenable to discipline while their fright lasted” (Jowett) or “in the panic of the moment they were ready to accept good discipline in everything, as the people tend to do in such circumstances” (Mynott).

Now of course Hale is entitled to deviate from Thucydides’ version, and to argue that that was deliberately skewed to show Athens in a negative light. The problem is that he doesn’t actually argue this – we’re simply offered an assertion of what happened, with the implication that this is solid undisputed fact, and the ‘quote’ from Thucydides clearly suggests that this is also his version. Moreover, this version of the quote is a complete misrepresentation of what Thucydides says – not, democracies are at their best in adversity, but, adversity causes democracies to behave more or less sensibly for a change. But of course that wouldn’t fit with the heroic narrative that Hale wants to present; it would still be quotable – but for a quite different agenda. Not ‘Keep Calm And Carry On’, as the British like to think of themselves – and it is surely only a matter of time before this misleading paraphrase starts getting cited more widely, what with Brexit and all – but the more realistic ‘Panic, and finally (briefly?) get real’.