Sphinx

I have another piece in my very small collection of Thucydideana! Like the last one (discussed here) it’s a collectible card, but it’s a good deal less impressive all round – monochrome printing on a thin brown card, with an abstract design on one side and a drawing of a distinctly bad-tempered bust of Thucydides on the other.

It’s clearly a card designed for collecting; there are several hundred of similar design, showing different historical figures (and a small number of other things, as I’llndiscuss below) available from the same seller on eBay, who has clearly acquired a set or two and is selling them off card by card (there are significant numbers of duplicates, but that could equally well indicate several collections and a single collection that retained all the duplicates in the hope of trading them for missing ones). And there’s the negative argument that there is no company name here, so it’s not a cigarette card or chocolate card or other form of advertising.

What was ‘The Daily Historic’? I have no idea – it is a very unhelpful phrase to try Googling, and it’s not mentioned in any of the websites about collectable cards that I’ve consulted. This may be a very small, local operation, which has perhaps survived just as a single collection – or, they’re just not very popular or interesting, given the lack of colour and low production values. In the absence of any information, I’m reduced to trying to infer things from the subjects of the cards – and this is rather puzzling, so if anyone out there does have relevant information I’d be delighted to hear it.

‘The Daily Historic’ was indisputably American. Among the several hundred cards there is a decent number of figures from ancient history and literature (more Greek than Roman, by my estimate – and very little from any other ancient culture) and European history, literature and philosophy, but then an overwhelming number from 18th- and especially 19th-century US history, most of them people of whom I have never heard: Rufus Blodgett, Jones Very, Lyman Abbott, Professor S. Stone Wiggins, Johnston Blakeley, Rufus Choate, Hamilton Fish. (I’m very keen to know if these are actually household names in the US today and I’m just being parochial). There are some odd omissions – no Washington or Franklin or Grant or Lee or Lincoln (though there is a John Wilkes Booth) – But my guess is that these readily found buyers as soon as they came on the market, rather than never having been included. There are probably fewer people out there collecting Bjornstjorne Bjornson memorabilia…

There are three other kinds of subject: a small number of cars (1922 Star station wagon, 1926 Bugatti, 1941 Lincoln Continental), a series on bull-fighting (!) offering a mixture of dramatic scenes (‘A Powerful Bull’, ‘A Triumphant Afternoon’) and depictions of specific moves/techniques, and a series of sportsmen, primarily from American Football and baseball, some from the early 20th century but others whose careers ran into the 1970s and early 1980s.

On the face of it, that suggests a terminus post quem for the whole set. But, if so, there is an astonishing lack of 20th-century figures, compared with the hordes of 19th-century ones. All the ones I can see, apart from the sportsmen, come from the early decades of the century: David Loyd (sic) George, Cecil Rhodes, Arthur Quiller-Crouch, Queen Wilhelmina, Sir Archibald Geikie, Archbishop Ireland. Further, Douglas Haig appears as ‘Sir Douglas Haig’ – by implication, post-1909 but pre-1917 – and one card depicts the Duke of Cornwall and York – the title of the future George V before his accession to the throne in 1910. I struggle to imagine why anyone would think Haig was collectable at all, but surely a set of cards produced after 1920 or so would call him either ‘Lord Haig’ or just ‘Douglas Haig’.

It’s much, much easier to understand the choice of subjects as reflecting an early C20 idea of historical noteworthiness; the only alternative that makes sense is that there were also lots of notable later C20 figures, but they have all already been sold. But what about the sportsmen? Well, while the basic design of the cards remains the same, the pictures here are reproductions of photographs, rather than the line drawings of all the historical figures; this suggests that they could be a much later series, even if it retains the gothic script of ‘The Daily Hostoric’ at the top. And it’s worth noting that both the cars and the bull-fighting cards are printed in (crude) colour; again, suggesting that they are later productions.

But on the other hand, that would imply significant continuity, from producing historical character card collections in the 1900s to producing American sportsmen card collections in the 1970s, without the enterprise responsible having left any obvious trace – the eBay selle describes the cards as ‘rare’, and certainly I can’t find anyone else selling them.

So, maybe my Thucydides is indeed rare, or even unique, as well as being in an extremely bad mood.

Appendix: the ancients depicted (not necessarily a complete list, as there are limited to how far I want to work through systematically 50+ screens of 50 cards each) include Aeschylus, Antisthenes, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, Achilles, Agamemnon, Augustus, Apuleius, Euripides, Hippocrates, Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Solon, Sappho, Socrates, Cicero, Marcus Iunius Brutus, Virgil, Seneca, Vespasian, Tiberius Claudius (?), Cleopatra, Vespasian and Caracalla – and, for some unaccountable reason, Bias.