Sphinx

It’s been a bumper year for Thucydiocy: an assortment of new sightings (‘Don’t confuse meaning with truth’, ‘You shouldn’t feel sorry for the lifestyle you haven’t tasted, but for the one you are about to lose’, ‘Democracies are always at their best when things seem at their worst’, and ‘You should punish in the same manner those who commit crimes with those who accuse falsely’), and the results of my study of who exactly is responsible for the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote with the stupid graduation photo (answer: a deeply annoying Social Jukebox), which means I feel justified in responding to it with emojis rather than a properly considered response.

But this year’s William F. Butler Award for Egregious Misquotation of Thucydides can have only one winner: the publicity team for Graham Allison’s Destined for War, for opportunistic bandwagon-jumping in adopting the ‘Thucydides’ quote from Wonder Woman, ‘Peace is only an armistice in an endless war’.

There’s a case that the film-makers should have known better, since they had an actual classicist as consultant, and presumably ignored him. But the argument that Allison and co. should know better is unanswerable, given that this is all about publicising a book that claims to interpret current events through a scholarly reading of Thucydides, and regularly refers back to his ideas – and it’s not just an intern getting carried away, as both Allison and Niall Ferguson tweeted the image above from their personal accounts, without any hint of recognition that this line might not be completely authentic.

More and more, it’s the People Who Really Should Know Better who get my back up. Almost everyone on the Twitter is quoting Fake Thucydides in good faith, because they seem like thought-provoking ideas or because signing up to a social media company seemed like a good way to publicise their business; the ones at fault are the Social Jukebox people making money out of tweeting crap for people, ignoring all requests to delete the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ one from their database (apparently it is possible for individual users to remove it from their feed – but surely they shouldn’t have to), and the quotes websites that likewise ignore all correspondence. It’s the House Armed Services Committee, that correctly attributed the line to William F. Butler in a 1989 report but then switched to Thucydides in its 2010 successor. It’s the History Department at West Point, who included the ‘Peace is just an armistice’ line in the list of quotes they supplied when the West Point Museum was refurbished in 1988, which is the earliest example I’ve yet found that’s directly attributed to Thucydides…

***

It’s not the only dodgy line painted on the museum walls; there’s also ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war: Plato’. And to be fair, as I learned through correspondence with Tom Palaima at UT Austin (and see Thomas Palaima and Lawrence A. Tritle’s Epilogue in B. Campbell & L.A. Tritle, eds., The Oxford Handbook of War in the Classical World (Oxford, 2013), 734-5), West Point isn’t the only museum involved in such shenanigans: the line is also carved into one of the walls of the Imperial War Museum in London. Tom’s enquiries revealed that this happened in 1989, as part of a wholesale refurbishment of the public galleries; the quote was chosen by the then Director General, Dr Alan Borg; where he got it is unknown, but it does appear in the anthology of military quotations edited by Robert Heinl (1966), a copy of which is in the IWM library, so that seems a reasonable bet.

The source of this ‘Plato’ line is fairly easy to trace. In May 1962, General Douglas MacArthur gave a valedictory speech to cadets at West Point, offering a powerful account of the role of the military in the United States:

Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty, Honor, Country. Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men’s minds. But serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the Nation’s war guardians, as its lifeguards from the raging tides of international conflict, as its gladiators in the arena of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded and protected its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice.

This does not mean, MacArthur argued, that the soldier is a warmonger.

On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

MacArthur had offered the same quotation in another speech, back in 1935. Both speeches, but the 1962 one especially, have been regularly quoted by serving and former military ever since, including the line from the wisest of all philosophers – which also found its way into the opening frame of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with Plato, so far as anyone has yet been able to work out. The earliest source seems to be the philosopher George Santayana, in one of his Soliloquies from England (London, 1922), presented as his thoughts in the immediate aftermath of the 1918 Armistice when he heard some soldiers singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’:

The poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war perhaps the last of all wars is over! Only the dead are safe ; only the dead have seen the end of war. Not that non-existence deserves to be called peace ; it is only by an illusion of contrast and a pathetic fallacy that we are tempted to call it so. (p. 102)

The train of Santayana’s reflections doesn’t get any more cheerful:

You suppose that this war has been a criminal blunder and an exceptional horror ; you imagine that before long reason will prevail, and all these inferior people that govern the world will be swept aside, and your own party will reform everything and remain always in office. You are mistaken. This war has given you your first glimpse of the ancient, fundamental, normal state of the world, your first taste of reality. (p. 103)

The ‘Great War’ great only because of the size of modern populations, compared with slaughters of Iliad; we are no true heirs of the ancient Greeks.

There is eternal war in nature, a war in which every cause is ultimately lost and every nation destroyed. War is but resisted change ; and change must needs be resisted so long as the organism it would destroy retains any vitality. Peace itself means discipline at home and invulnerability abroad, two forms of permanent virtual war ; peace requires so vigorous an internal regimen that every germ of dissolution or infection shall be repelled before it reaches the public soul. This war has been a short one, and its ravages slight in comparison with what remains standing : a severe war is one in which the entire manhood of a nation is destroyed, its cities razed, and its women and children driven into slavery. In this instance the slaughter has been greater, perhaps, only because modern populations are so enormous; the disturbance has been acute only because the modern industrial system is so dangerously complex and unstable; and the expense seems prodigious because we were so extravagantly rich. Our society was a sleepy glutton who thought himself immortal and squealed inexpressibly, like a stuck pig, at the first prick of the sword. An ancient city would have thought this war, or one relatively as costly, only a normal incident ; and certainly the Germans will not regard it otherwise. (104-5)

Santayana’s evocation of ancient ideas about war, to establish its eternal inevitability (‘ancient, fundamental, normal’) and to castigate those who believed in the War To End All Wars as naive and distinctively modern, offers an obvious reason for a casual reader – or one recalling a striking line without troubling to check the reference – to attribute the sentiment to Plato. It’s equally obvious why MacArthur, eulogising the role of the soldier as the foundation of society, made use of it. Why should two different military museums, on either side of the Atlantic, have chosen to revive MacArthur’s citation of ‘Plato’? One might surmise a connection to contemporary events, another apparent end to conflict and outbreak of peace when entrenched military attitudes might appear out of step with the Zeitgeist: the end of the Cold War. The ‘Thucydides’ line has the same import: don’t be fooled, people, and don’t stop funding the military – peace is a temporary lull at best.

***

It’s possible that tracing the origins and histories of quotes like these is revealing an ongoing discourse of the naturalisation of war, working less through explicit justifications and analysis than through symbols and memes. And through other means: in a recent discussion of the ‘Thucydides’ quote at http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/thucydides-quote-wonder-woman-it-legit, Jon Miltimore feels sure he’s heard the line before, and wonders whether it might be one of the quotes that pop up in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Maybe, it doesn’t feature in the helpful fanwiki list of quotes – http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/Quoted_sayings_in_the_Call_of_Duty_series – but I’m not absolutely certain that this is complete (interestingly, there’s no Thucydides at all that I can see), and the query I posted on Reddit hasn’t borne any fruit.

Looking further back, Nathan Tarcov at Chicago has suggested a possible source in Hobbes, perhaps drawing distantly on Thucydides – given that Chapter XIII, ‘Of the naturall condition of mankind’, from which the following quote is taken, is one where the influence of Thucydides (in the account of the warre of all against all, the irrelevance of questions of justice and injustice, the failures of anticipation, the three principle causes of quarrel etc.) is felt most strongly:

For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.

The paragraph concludes with the line “All other time is PEACE”; that doesn’t wholly contradict the ‘peace is only an armistice’ idea, as war is the period “wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known”, without implying that there is no will to battle during periods of peace – but it still feels a bit of a stretch to see as the specific point of origin. An alternative possibility, suggested by Chris Brooke at Cambridge, is to focus on the 18th-century discussion of ‘Perpetual Peace’, which draws partly on Hobbes:

I suspect the proximate origin of the fake quote in which you’re interested is the “Perpetual Peace” discourse of the eighteenth century, which goes way beyond what we find in Kant’s essay of the same name. So, Rousseau, summarising Saint-Pierre, writes (in Vaughan’s translation), “Let us admit then that the Powers of Europe stand to each other strictly in a state of war, and that all the separate treaties between them are in the nature rather of a temporary truce than a real peace…” [‘A lasting peace through the federation of Europe’, 1756]. That’s obviously a Hobbist thought (and the basic structure of Saint-Pierre’s thinking is Hobbist), but it’s much closer to your fake quote than anything that I think we find in Hobbes (and Hobbes on international relations is complicated, as first Richard Tuck but then especially Noel Malcolm showed). The core theme of the perpetual peace writers is that something radical has to happen to the structures and practices of international politics to escape this condition—but then all you need to do to get to the content of your fake quote is agree with the diagnosis but reject the prescription (and that’s easy to do, since the diagnosis is plausible, and the prescriptions so often come across as utopian). And radicals in the nineteenth century are indebted to this eighteenth-century discourse in one way or another (so this may be where the Fourierism you found comes from), culminating in things like Charles Lemonnier’s International League for Peace and Freedom in the later part of the C19th.

Even if the explicit focus of these discussions is contemporary Europe, there’s always a classical dimension; Rousseau’s account of Saint-Pierre, mentioned above, discusses ancient precedents for leagues of nations, and contrasts the spirit of the Greeks, sharply distinguishing themselves from ‘barbarians’ and hence rendering any such compact untenable, with the generosity of the Romans in extending citizenship as well as the benefits of peace to conquered peoples. There’s even a possibility that this discourse may offer circumstantial grounds for attributing the coinage of the specific quote to Napoleon (while taking on board the warning that, as so often, we’re relying on second-hand and not terribly trustworthy accounts of the great man’s words, which in any case were often exaggerated for rhetorical effect or simply flights of fancy; cf. P. Dwyer, ‘Napoleon and the Universal Monarchy’, History 95.3 (2010)). As Chris notes, the Abbé Sieyès, who played a key role in Napoleon’s rise to power, spent time in Berlin, and there’s a clear convergence between his ideas and those of Kant that suggests influence in at least one direction if not both (see I. Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: perpetual peace and closed society, Princeton 2011).

My impression, on a casual skimming of some relevant literature, is that the idea of ‘peace as a mere armistice’ is entirely conventional in the 18th century if not before; it has some ancient roots, both specific (Thucydides’ argument that the Peloponnesian War was indeed a single conflict, regardless of the existence of a period of peace in the middle, and Plato’s remark in Laws 626a) and more general, but those are secondary to the debate. Its subsequent development has two distinct components: its emergence as a quotable line attributed to a specific individual (Napoleon, then Thucydides), and the shift from ‘this is the present state of things; we need a radical solution (e.g. a federation of nations) to solve it’ to the more pessimistic, ‘realist’ and/or cynical view that ‘this is the present state of things, and it’s eternal and natural so get used to it’ – the dominant reading in the present, which, like the Santayana quote attributed to Plato, serves a quite different ideological function.

None of which justifies the Destined for War marketing campaign…