Sphinx

Another new pseudo-Thucydides quote – an increasingly rare event, not because the level of misattribution is dropping to any measurable degree but because it’s the same couple of familiar misattributions every time – as French Minister of Economy Bruno le Maire commented* in a private meeting for French businessmen about Trump’s imposition of sanctions on Iran and the funding of international terrorism: “money is the nerve of war”, attributing this to Thucydides.

Thucydides? No, Cicero; Philippics 5.5, to be exact, with “nervos belli, pecuniam infinitam”, an idea that’s then echoed or discussed by Quintus Curtius, Appian and numerous other people. It took me a while to realise this, as the more familiar English phrase is ‘sinews of war’. That’s what Cicero meant by nervos, of course (cf. the lengthy discussion in Vegetius on the use of nervi in catapults and other war engines, and hence the importance of stock-piling them). Certainly in the early modern period, the two words were used interchangeably in modern European languages too; for example in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Titus Livius (Book 2 Chapter X is dedicated to the question of whether “money is the nerve of war” is true or not, attributing the idea to Quintus Curtius), Rabelais’s Gargantua, and James Harrington’s Oceana, heavily influenced by Machiavelli, which explains the circumstances in which the maxim is true (France has a population that’s largely degenerate and Venice doesn’t have many people at all) and when it isn’t (the Romans didn’t have to worry, and neither should any well-ordered Commonwealth).

The idea of money being the ‘nerve of war’ was still being discussed in 1761, in an anonymous handbook of military advice (perhaps because that book was, or at least was presented as, a compilation of established wisdom). According to Google n-grams, however, ‘sinews of war’ has far out-stripped either ‘nerve’ or ‘nerves’ in every year except 1735-7 – usual caveats apply, but that’s a pretty clear graph. In France, however, “la nerf de la guerre” became established as the stock phrase.

How does Thucydides come into this? The obvious reason is that he (or rather one of his speakers; in this case Pericles, at 1.83) offers a similar claim byt without the anatomical analogy: “wars are won not by arms but by money”. It’s entirely possible that Machiavelli is engaging with this passage in the relevant section of the Discorsi, where he notes that despite Pericles’ claims, the outcome of the Peloponnesian War was the victory of the warriors of Sparta over the resources of Athens – indeed, I’m inclined to take this as evidence that Machiavelli had read Thucydides, something that’s still in dispute among scholars, as that specific idea doesn’t show up in any other ancient account of Pericles that I’m aware of. But that doesn’t lead Machiavelli, or any of those influenced by him, to attribute the specific line to Thucydides.

Initial Google searches produced very little, so I was starting to incline towards giving Le Maire credit for starting the whole thing – with the caveat that my skills in searching in French are definitely limited. There are indications that he’s used the phrase before – but it does seem to be an absolute cliche, and he uses it without any attribution to Thucydides that I can see. And even if Le Maire does make that connection, he isn’t the only one: a magazine article on the origins of the phrase specifically links it to Thucydides. Maybe this is our Patient Zero, but maybe not; further contributions to the paper-trail always welcome…

*I’m reliant for this on a blog post by one Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, founder of the Europe-Iran Forum; I haven’t managed to find any other report of the meeting, partly because my French isn’t good enough, but there’s no obvious reason why anyone would make up a Thucydides reference just to annoy me…