Sphinx

Change. War. Violence. Unpredictability. Competition. Malevolence. Food. Music. The Rangers in the universe of Babylon 5. Inter-ethnic slaughter. Death. And that no one cares a whit about the Armenians.

This is a precis of the search results for “the one constant in human history”. Add ‘Thucydides’ to the mix, and the themes narrow down to war, violence, and human nature – which doesn’t, however, get me any further in tracking down the source of the specific quote I’m looking for: “Human nature is the one constant through human history. It is always there.” Google that, and you get a large number of low-rent quote sites, a number of annoying motivational posters, and regular blogs from one Earl Heal for the Daily Republic, a local news site in California, who trots out the same set of quotes about the glories of classical political institutions on almost every occasion.It’s not actually Thucydides, but someone’s gloss on the to anthropinon line – but whose? Googling the exact phrase produces nothing; but the words and the sentiments are so vague and commonplace that googling anything else produces far too many hits, none of them very helpful. There was a point where I got quite excited about someone quoting Richard Schlatter’s classic 1945 article on ‘Thomas Hobbes and Thucydides (Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 3 (June, 1945), 357): “The idea of an unchanging human nature, the constant element in history…” – but that’s not the exact phrase, and how would that then have found its way in a garbled from onto a small number of websites peddling motivational quotations?

Without having the time to pursue it in depth – I really, really should be finishing an article, which is of course why my rate of posting in the blog has gone up – I am rather struck by the importance of this idea for the Australian League of Rights, a virulently anti-communist and anti-semitic organisation, whose founder, Eric Butler, offers the statement as definitive proof that collective organisation goes against eternal human nature and therefore the will of the Creator (see here, if you really want to). But no mention of Thucydides…