Just to prove that I don’t only care about misquotations of Thucydides – though admittedly I came across this one in the course of correcting yet another occurrence of the familiar “the society that separates its scholars from its warriors…” line. In this case, it was being cited in response to this tweet:
“He who is only an athlete is too crude, too vulgar, too much a savage. He who is a scholar only is too soft, to effeminate. The ideal citizen is the scholar athlete, the man of thought and the man of action.” – Plato
— 🇬🇧 IM 🇬🇧 (@TellYourSonThis) August 14, 2018
This looked somewhat dubious at first glance, and attempts at googling key phrases just produced lots of people quoting the same thing (or the same thing with “too effeminate”), mostly in support of their sporting philosophies. However, as Sententiae Antiquae (@sentantiq) has identified, it is not completely ungenuine: it’s a paraphrase of Jowett’s translation of the Republic, 410b-412a, simply substituting ‘scholar’ for the original ‘musician’. According to Socrates, the man who can best blend music with gymnastics and apply them both to the soul is not merely the ideal citizen but the prototype of the city’s future rulers. You could even argue that it’s not unreasonable to see music as standing in for the whole range of liberal arts, requiring the admixture of physical training and prowess to make them fulling effective just as athletes need to indulge their inner geek to avoid complete savagery. And actually this seems to be paraphrasing so much text that it seems likely it was never originally intended to be read as a quote – but someone then reproduced it as such…Perhaps this is a suitable note on which to end @Thucydiocy’s year, not least since I’m halfway through an experiment – suggested by a visitor to this blog – to see if it makes any different calling it The Thucydides Bot rather than the ruder version. It’s perhaps a little early to say; in the first week, my impression was that my corrections were getting a few more responses than normal, and reasonably courteous ones, but over the last fortnight it all seems to be pretty well normal; nothing new, just the usual round of ‘scholars and warriors’ citations. As noted back in February, exploring the idea that Thucydides invented the motto Who Dares Wins, often the most interesting aspect of this is the process of investigation, uncovering how a dodgy quote came to be accepted and publicised – and, while I did make some progress with Wikiquotes and GoodReads, there are a lot of rogue quote websites out there who don’t respond to emails…
One thing I’ve done to make my life easier is mute various of the accounts who have adopted ‘Thucydides’ as part of their Twitter handles or identities, which means that they show up in all my word searches – in some cases churning out scores of tweets every day that have nothing to do with Thucydides. At some point I am going to find time for my study of the preferences and affiliations of people who adopt Thucydides as part of their online personae – potentially, as part of a paper I’ll be giving on Thucydides and Twitter for a conference in Newcastle in February on Authority in Creating Contemporary Narratives about the Classics. The other thing I do is just keep this blog up to date with iffy quotes, so that I don’t waste time searching for them all over again. Which brings us to the following…
The present, while never repeating the past exactly, must inevitably resemble it.
That is just WRONG. It’s obvious which passage of Thucydides it’s derived from, and it’s obvious why people like it (echoes of the “history doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme” line often attributed to Mark Twain), but it’s a terrible, terrible translation, chucking in a whole load of ideas that aren’t there in the original. But it is genuine, in the sense that it appears in a bona fide published translation – albeit that of Richard Crawley, about which I grumble on a regular basis. It’s certainly not something to be corrected forcefully; at best it merits a gentle “that’s not the greatest translation” comment – but twice now I have seen it, forgotten about seeing it previously and then wasted a lot of time establishing that it is actually Crawley. No more; if it’s on here, I’ll be able to check.
Update: I’ve come across a speech from 2007 by a Professor of Sports Science from Brigham Young University Hawaii (!) on The Pursuit of Arete, which offers a large number of inspiring quotes from classical sources that I really can’t be bothered to check (spliced with lines from the Gospels that arguably have rather less to do with literal athleticism), and mentions that a former student had “quoted” Plato, as in the version above, in his application essay. I wonder if this is the source – with the student offering something as a neat encapsulation that was then taken as a quote.
Sphinx 
The “athleticism plus arts” idea is accepted as an account of the training of the Guardian class by Popper, who then points out that the implied tempered ferocity is like that of a sheepdog (his main point, of course, being the estimation of the populace this suggests). On a not altogether related and slightly defensive note, I, like my Dad, am something of a liberal artsy-sporty person, and have sometimes felt that an habituation to competition without damaging egotism might improve some academics and academic environments (others too, doubtless, but I restrict myself to what I have directly experienced). Meant in all good spirit!
Of course Popper was very much not the fan of Plato… Yes, one thing to be said for the revised quote/paraphrase is that it is much more egalitarian: the balance between athleticism and intellectual development is the model for *every* citizen, not just the aristocratic elite. I wonder whether it’s significant that Greek athletics privileged individual sports and individual excellence, rather than the sort of team efforts you got in the phalanx or the triremes.
Well, the Greeks were certainly an, ahem, agonistic bunch, and your comparison brings that out. Perhaps worth noting, though, even if it slides a little further away from your original point, that it risks reproducing an implicitly undemocratic individual / collective dichotomy Popper (and many other Social Democrats) was anxious to discredit and for which he blamed Plato and his conflation of individualism and selfishness. With more particular reference to team ethics, those worth any attention are always concerned with negotiating the relation between individuality (initiative, insight, decision-making, say) and collectivity, much like most liberal political theory, ethics, aesthetics etc. – which means that informed commentary on sports is always confronting rather large questions, or at least, questions which yield food for wider thought. Which is one reason I make no apology for time spent watching and reading about (mostly) my two or three preferred sports )). Whoever it was that coached the great Lions sides of the early ’70s once said that before a match, you wanted your fly-half as full of himself as he could be, your blind-side flanker in as grudging a frame of mind as possible, etc., etc…Identity and Difference kinda thing….
Yes, I seem to recall a quite recent discussion of this in relation to cricket, where you need players simultaneously to be performing brilliantly in their individual excellence, and yet simultaneously conscious of the needs of the team, because sometimes the former conflicts with the latter (e.g. Boycott’s willingness to run his batting partners out to protect himself). Sorry, my English is haywire – currently in Germany, so switching between languages a lot and ending up somewhere in the middle…
I’m pretty sure the ethics of run-outs could yield a literature as substantial and various as the infamous trolleybus or tram. And Boycott’s career, including his latterday reintegration into (with??) the cricketing community, would be fit subject for a Plutarch (pardoned, by analogy with Auden’s Paul Claudel, for commentating well??). As it is, I suppose this (and much else) is occasion for ongoing phronesis…One more notion while we/I are on the subject: it seems to me a degree of knowledge of sport might help with eg. getting a feel for the action in, say, The Iliad: feeling a God come upon one or, alternatively, quailing before one’s opponent have always seemed to me rather like the ebb and flow of adrenaline and other chemicals that is so often evident in sporting contests. I even wonder whether there are any grounds for reading Hector’s flight from Achilles as an instance of accepting a blow to one’s pride, preserving oneself and seeking to fight at a more opportune moment “for the sake of the team.” Anyway, thanks for indulging my little preoccupation!