Sphinx

On 2nd November 1860, the political scientist Francis Lieber, then professor of history and political science at Columbia College in New York, wrote a letter to his eldest son Oscar. War between the states loomed on the horizon; Lieber was firmly against secession, and during the conflict was in charge of the Loyal Publication Society as well as assisting in drafting military laws, while his two other sons would both serve in the Union army, but Oscar would die in 1862 fighting for the Confederacy. One can imagine the family tensions. Lieber wrote:

It sometimes has occurred to me that what Thucydides said of the Greeks at the time of the Peloponnesian War applies to us. The Greeks, he said, did not understand each other any longer, though they spoke Greek. Words received a different meaning in different parts.

When the historian James Ford Rhodes cited Lieber (referring to him in the text as “a philosopher, living in the South but sympathizing with the North” – which seems a little questionable, given that he’d taken up his position in New York in 1856, but I don’t have a copy of the biography to check), he observed that “Lieber quoted from memory and gave a free translation”, citing the relevant passage in Jowett’s edition of Thucydides. “A free translation” is generous to say the least. The final sentence in the quote makes it clear, as Rhodes had recognised, that Lieber was echoing Thucydides’ famous account of the stasis or civil war at Corcyra (3.82.4): “words changed their meanings” under the influence of factionalism and partisanship – or, as Mynott renders the complex language, “men assumed the right to reverse the usual values in the application of words to actions” – so that recklessness became regarded as courage and moderation became cowardice. But the comment about Greeks not understanding each other though they spoke Greek is not Thucydides but Lieber’s gloss, and he seems to imply that the phenomenon was geographical, with different regions developing a different understanding of the meaning of words, rather than all sides within a single, increasingly polarised community diverging in similar manner from traditional understanding.

Twenty years earlier, Lieber had cited Thucydides at length (and correctly) in his discussion of the dangers of partisanship in his Manual of Political Ethics:

Party spirit may run so high that the greatest link and tie of humanity, language, loses its very essence, and people cease to understand one another, when even the best intended words, as in theological controversies in religiously excited times, are unintentionally yet passionately, or wilfully wronged, misconstrued, wrung from their very sense; when, as Thucydides says was the case in Greece, during the Peloponnesian war… [quote follows]

Lieber at this point took the optimistic view that the danger today was not so great as in ancient times, because “our states are vaster, our race is less apt to be moved by masses, we value individuality higher, our religion, so long as unsullied by fanaticism, is of a tempering character, and above all, we act through representative governments.” There are strong echoes here of some of the arguments developed earlier in The Federalist Papers, citing examples of ancient factionalism as grounds for favouring representation as the key principle of the new state (as indeed is discussed in Thomas Gustafson’s Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776-1865, where I found this helpful reference to Lieber). “Where the democracy is absolute, and the state small, the one indeed requires the other, it is difficult, to see how any party can be secure against breaking out into passion.” Nevertheless, Lieber strongly commends the reading of this passage of Thucydides, especially younger readers, as the danger still exists and will exist so long as men cherish freedom of action and are mental and moral individuals differing in their dispositions and prone to pursuing with zeal what they think is right.

By 1860, the tendency for humans to pursue their own convictions with energy and even fanaticism, and the consequences for the political community and its shared language, was all too real; and it seems perfectly understandable that Lieber should have recalled the powerful impression of Thucydides’ text as the definitive account of factionalism, even while getting all the details wrong and being too preoccupied to check. The letter to his son was never sent.

This is fantastic material for a conference paper I never got round to writing up, on different readings of the Corcyra stasis as a text for the present (including a fair amount on the late C18 American debate, that I can now supplement with Gustafson’s book). But it also relates to an opportunity for an interesting experiment in the contemporary citation of Thucydides: is it possible to nip a fake quotation in the bud, before it spreads?

The first I heard of Lieber was on Wednesday morning, when my usual monitoring of Thucydides references on the Twitter threw up a couple of people retweeting a New Yorker article by Robin Wright, Is America a Myth?, on the current unravelling of the United States, with this quote:

When Athens and Sparta went to war, in the fifth century B.C., the Greek general and historian Thucydides observed, “The Greeks did not understand each other any longer, though they spoke the same language.” In the twenty-first century, the same thing is happening among Americans.

No, not Thucydides. A quick google led me to the Rhodes quotation of the quotation in his 1912 lectures at Oxford on the origins of the Civil War, which made it clear that this was actually linked to the Corcyra passage and thus saved me a lot of work trying to identify lines in Thucydides that might have been mistranslated or garbled in this manner. A quick perusal of the Wright article showed that the line was taken directly from Richard Kreitner’s new book, Break It Up: secession, division, and the secret history of America’s imperfect union, where it’s used as an epigram for chapter 13 on ‘The Cold Civil War’. As Kreitner remarks in his notes (and I’m extremely grateful to him for sending me a screenshot of the relevant pages),

In 1860, the jurist Francis Lieber, living in South Carolina, used this quote to describe the acrimony between North and South. According to historian James Ford Rhodes, Lieber quoted the text from memory and muddled the translation. I have given Lieber’s version.

As I said above, I am not sure that Rhodes was right in locating Lieber in South Carolina in 1860. More importantly, the quotation is not so much muddled as fictitious; the bit that Lieber actually took from Thucydides is the final sentence that Kreitner doesn’t quote, whereas the line about Greeks not understanding each other is at best Lieber’s gloss on the passage.

As so often, the quote offers a powerful and extremely relevant idea; it is easy to imagine it being widely cited on the internet, first by New Yorker readers but then at some point escaping out into the wider culture and becoming naturalised – probably via GoodReads. One can even imagine it being taken up by participants in the interminable online debates about whether or not Thucydides provides definitive proof that Macedonians are or are not Greek, since that frequently revolves around issues of language and cultural homogeneity.

Normally, by the time I encounter a rogue quotation this has already happened; I can trace back the process by which it escaped and became associated with Thucydides (not necessarily in that order) – posts on this blog passim – but it’s already embedded in the sorts of Great Quotes websites that harvest content from one another and refuse to pay any attention to request for correction, and so hard if not impossible to eradicate.

I’m actually torn between wanting to stamp this one out before it has a chance to breed, and wanting to study what actually happens – how long does it take to spread? But the latter would require that the Thucydides Bot does not correct the line if it’s quoted, and would contribute to the total sum of fake information out there, which is already quite substantial enough. So instead I am going to take preventative action: the immediate addition of this to the list of ‘misattributed’ Thucydides quotes on Wikiquote, the submission of it to GoodReads under the name of Lieber rather than Thucydides (so any attempt at submitting it under the name of Thucydides can be redirected there rather than having a clear run.

And then we will see just how powerless and lacking in influence I am!

It’s interesting to note, incidentally, that Rhodes, whether or not prompted by Lieber’s remark, was entirely ready to consider the Civil War through the lens of Thucydides. He opened his first lecture by arguing that the history of the English Civil War was relevant to the subject, “though it may not convey as important lessons to the whole civilized world as did that one of which Thucydides was the historian”, and in advancing his claim that there was in fact one simple explanation for the American Civil War, there was one unimpeachable authority:

There is risk in referring any historic event to a single cause. Lecky entitled his celebrated chapter, ” Causes of the French Revolution.” Social and political, as well as religious, reasons, according to Gardiner, brought on the Great Civil War. Thucydides, on the other hand, though he did indeed set forth the “grounds of quarrel,” stated his own belief that ” the real though unavowed cause” of the war was “the growth of the Athenian power.” And of the American Civil War it may safely be asserted that there was a single cause, slavery.

But the most fascinating aspect of this particular rabbit-hole has been the discovery of Gustafson’s book, not least because he seems – to the best of my knowledge – to be the first to have promoted the idea of ‘The Thucydidean Moment’ as the successor to ‘the Machiavellian Moment’ identified by John Pocock – and as a distinctively American line of thought:

I use the term “the Thucydidean moment” to describe the moment that succeeds the failure of the Machiavellian moment: it is the moment when fortune or necessity or corruption defeats virtue, or when moral and political stability – and the code of language that sustains that stability – collapses into confusion and the muteness of violence. Railing against this collapse, the poet’s voice articulates the conditions of this chaos, this fall of words. In the crucible of the Thucydidean moment, under the pressure of competing voices, from the heat of clashing interests, “words strain, crack and sometimes break.”

This does feel all too relevant to the present – and if discussion of Kreitner’s book and other current commentary on the Civil War and its contemporary echoes doesn’t lead to a revival of interest in what Gustafson has to say on the subject, I’ll just have to do my best to raise its profile in my own work-in-progress…

References

Letter from Francis Lieber to Oscar Lieber, dated November 2, 1860, quoted in Frank Friedel, Francis Lieber: Nineteenth Century Liberal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), p. 301

James Ford Rhodes, Lectures on the American Civil War, delivered before the University of Oxford in Easter and Trinity Terms 1912 (New York: Macmillan, 1913), pp. 66-7

Francis Lieber, Manual of Political Ethics, Vol. II (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1911 [1838]), pp. 262-3

Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776-1865 (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), p. 80

Richard Kreitner, Break It Up: secession, division, and the secret history of America’s imperfect union (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2020)