Sphinx

This weekend, there’s a fabulous-looking conference at Cornell on Thucydides and Aristophanes in honour of the great and wonderful Jeff Rusten. The advertising on the Twitter is slightly less wonderful…

Now, if this were my colleagues organising a conference in my honour, this would be deliberate trolling; thankfully that’s a very unlikely eventuality, so even if this gives them any ideas they won’t be able to put them into practice. In this case? Yes, it may be that sophisticated Ivy League humour one hears about, and of course (as has been noted on the Twitter) Jeff is far too nice actually to beat anyone to death with a tire-iron in retaliation.

More likely, this is the College’s publicity department sincerely looking for a suitable Thucydides quote for the advertising, and not actually checking it with anyone. It’s relevant to note that the image doesn’t appear on the website as far as I can see. Mostly, this is just evidence of how embedded this and similar quotes are in the information sphere – and how readily people just accept what they find with a quick google search, if it suits their purposes. Earlier in the week we had a different example from the UK, a fake motivational Churchill quote painted on the wall of a school:

What’s most interesting about this one is the response from the head teacher responsible (who isn’t just a head teacher, it should be noted, but a prominent figure in educational debates, much favoured by the current government): the quote may not be genuine but it “captures the essence” of truth, it may not be real but it works, objecting to it is actually an assault on the school and its great successes, and anyway whom should she apologise to, Churchill?

As has often been noted, there is a remarkable cross-over between people who loudly object to the dismantling of statues, claiming that this destroys history in pursuit of an ideological agenda, and people who loudly object to historical/factual objections to their ideological claims. I don’t think the Cornell College of Arts and Sciences publicity team is in this category – but perhaps they do reflect a more widespread lack of critical thought, that allows the ideologues to get away with their blustering…