Sphinx

There are ‘Thucydides’ quotes that immediately raise suspicions, and generally they are easiest to eliminate as being fake – “A collision at sea can ruin your whole day” is so obviously a modern fiction that it’s scarcely worth worrying about, even before you notice that it was originally attributed to Book 9. Most, however, are at least plausible – and, given that Thucydides’ difficult Greek can almost always be translated in multiple ways, it can be extremely difficult to establish that a quote really isn’t genuine if you can’t track down the phrase in another source that is manifestly not Thucydides. I suppose one could argue that the burden of proof should be on those who propagate dubious quotations to justify the claim that they’re from Thucydides, but given that most of these sites and Twitter bots ignore all attempts to get them to correct quotes that are definitively fake, even when provided with evidence, the chances of getting them to do any work themselves seem to be zero at best.

The plausibility of some of these quotes, the way that they seem to ring a faint bell, means that even someone who obsessively tracks fake Thucydideana (that would be me, then – though the other day someone else on the Twitter did leap in to correct a misquotation before my own @Thucydiocy account caught up with it) occasionally misses one. It was just this morning when I suddenly became suspicious of a quote I’ve seen numerous times before:

You should punish in the same manner those who commit crimes with those who accuse falsely. Thucydides

I think I’ve let this one pass before because it seemed so obviously to come from the Mytilene Debate, where Cleon and Diodotus (especially the latter) start talking about the responsibilities of the speakers in the assembly not to mislead the people for the sake of popularity or for fear of the consequences if they offer wise advice that goes down like a lead balloon. Suddenly, however, I was struck by the weird phrasing: surely it should be “punish those who accuse falsely like you punish criminals”, or “punish criminals and those who accuse falsely in the same way”? And, having developed this suspicion, I have looked through the Mytilene Debate, and done a wider Google search for relevant phrases, and cannot find anything beyond a series of cheap quote websites offering this exact phrase and attributing it to Thucydides.

Now, at this point I can’t be certain that this isn’t a slightly weird (or bad) translation of a genuine bit of Thucydides, whether from the Mytilene Debate or somewhere else; for that, I really need more of a trail, some sense of when this line first started being quoted (at the moment, all I have is the fact that it doesn’t appear to be attributed to anyone else, at least not as far as Google is concerned). If anyone has any brilliant suggestions, do please get in touch…

Update: playing around a little with the search parameters, I find that, before 2010, there were only 13 webpages which included this quote, all in exactly the same form and attributed to Thucydides, all of them part of sites which compile deep and meaningful quotations – and all of them appearing on 1st February 2001, not before and not after. Impossible so far to discern which is the original and which the copies, or whether they were all generated simultaneously from the same body of material, let alone where they got this line in the first place – and I can’t avoid a suspicion that perhaps these sites were created then, but only added this quote later. In the absence of other evidence, I’m tempted to blame GoodReads, as (a) it’s the most prominent and (b) I’ve tried to get them to change quotes in the past and been ignored…

Update: Jonathan Dresner observes on the Twitter that the lawcode of Hammurabi has a similar (but better formulated) structure against those who bear false witness, and on reflection I imagine that most ancient law codes do, given the importance of trusting people’s words in an oral society. But that doesn’t explain this particular (weird) phrasing, let alone the attribution to Thucydides. Standard practice of attributing any stray quote to Thucydides, as in the case of the Solon line about “justice will not come to Athens…”?