Sphinx

Hope is an expensive commodity. It makes better sense to be prepared. Thucydides

A new addition to the taxonomy of Thucydides misquotations! This popped up on the Twitter for the first time this morning, though I see from Google that it already features on a couple of the dodgier quotes websites and – rather unexpectedly, at first glance – in a couple of books on topics like Biosecurity and ‘making Chemistry relevant’. The original source also turns out to be the explanation: it’s from the afterword of The Cobra Event, a 1998 thriller by Richard Preston (who seems to specialise in this sort of thing), in which a scientist working for the Center for Disease Control races against time to trace the source of a lethal new virus developed by genetically splicing smallpox with the common cold, before it wipes out New York City. The original passage is as follows:

To think that the power of genetic code is not being bent towards weapons is to ignore the growing body of evidence, the lessons of history, and the reality of human nature. As Thucydides pointed out, hope is an expensive commodity. It makes better sense to be prepared.

That makes it slightly clearer: the first part of the quote (“hope is an expensive commodity”) is genuine Thucydides, from the ubiquitous Melian Dialogue, but the second is Preston’s commentary on the lesson to be learnt. It’s a chimera quote, reminiscent of the habit of taking a paraphrase (Henry Kissinger’s gloss on Thucydides’ account of the usefulness of history, for example) for the real thing, but with a clearer distinction between the quotation and the modern addition, in the original, that is then occluded through the process of excerption and dissemination.

One consequence is that the line looks more plausible because half of it is genuine. Another is that it’s more laborious to correct…