Sphinx

Okay, this is a first for me; I’ve just produced a new episode of the Thucydiocy podcast (Podbean link here; iTunes always takes longer to process), without it being based on a previous blog post. As I tend to use the blog as a repository in case I need to check up on misattributions and misquotations, this is potentially slightly tricky, and so I thought I should simply add a rough transcript (or rather, an expanded version of my script notes) for future reference…

There’s a very entertaining piece in a recent issue of the London Review of Books by Colin Burrow, reviewing The New Yale Book of Quotations in typical LRB style – that is, offering general thoughts on the general topic, with the book itself playing second fiddle. Given how much time I spend dealing with Thucydides misquotations and misattributions, I really liked this comment: 

Books of quotations are no longer sources of things you might want to say or cite – after all, you can Google and copy and paste as much of that text stuff as you like – but have become in effect books of anti-misquotations (though don’t expect to see that word on a title page any time soon). Their main function is to tell you who didn’t quite say what.

Well, this podcast, and the Thucydiocy Bot, are very much in the business of anti-misquotation – and, given the absolute plague of ‘Scholars and Warriors’ misattribution on the Twitter in recent weeks, as people keep sharing one of those stupid shitposting wojak versus Mediterranean memes (reproduced below, as I don’t think anyone is seriously going to admit to creating it), I really wish I’d known about the new edition of the Yale thing, as I could have lobbied them to include it. In fact their T offering is very disappointing; the first edition had just three quotes, none of them terribly obvious or famous – and cited as e.g. ‘Book 2 Chapter 4’, a sure sign that they’re relying on Crawley’s translation – and the new edition just reproduces them. I mean, that’s the same number as Bono gets (also not the most obvious choice). Judith Butler gets one; William F. Butler gets nothing… 

Anyway, what I wanted to discuss in this episode is not misattributed quotations but mangled ones – not ‘T didn’t say that’ so much as ‘T didn’t mean that’. Granted, this could be said of half the regular attempts at invoking T, e.g. implying that views of Athenians in the Melian D are his own ideas, but this is a slightly more technical category, where the quotation is translated in an unexpected or arguable manner, and/or removed completely from its original context, in a way that means I have to spend some time just to work out whether or not it might be genuine, and if so where it comes from. Interestingly, two examples appeared on Twitter just the other week in close succession.. 

“Anyone who, in pursuing the highest goals, tolerates envy has the right priorities.” Huh? Didn’t recognise this at all, but tracked it down relatively easily; it’s Plutarch, towards the end of his essay on how to tell a true friend from a flatterer, in the Penguin Classics version by Robin Waterfield, section 35, and he does indeed name T as his source: 

There is also the point that Thucydides makes when he says, ‘Anyone who, in pursuing the highest goals, tolerates envy has the right priorities.’ It is correct for a friend to put up with the hostility his reprimands generate, when crucially important issues are involved. However, if he gets irate at everything, whatever the situation, and relates to his acquaintances as if they were his pupils rather than his friends, then when very important issues arise and he tries to deliver a reprimand, he will be feeble and ineffective – he has used up his candour.

Still doesn’t look a lot like T., and the context doesn’t really help – but another translation offered both a reference, and a version of the quote that was more recognisable; this is Frank Cole Babbitt in the Loeb edition: 

Then again, as Thucydides says, ‘Whoever incurs unpopularity over matters of the highest importance, shows a right judgement’; so it is the duty of a friend to accept the odium that comes from giving admonition when matters of importance and of great concern are at stake.

It’s 2.64, Pericles’ final speech, reproaching the Athenians for having become discontented with his leadership, war, plague etc. The preceding comment, in the original, notes that ‘to be hated and unpopular at the time has been the fate of all those who claim power to rule over others’; then, in MartinHammond’s version, ‘if there must be unpopularity, it is best incurred in the pursuit of the greatest aims’, or in Jeremy Mynott’s, ‘the wise decision is to accept the odium in pursuit of the larger purpose.’ 

Two interesting things going on here. Firstly, Plutarch basically takes quote completely out of context; he takes a questionable claim (‘let them hate us, ‘cos we’re building a massive empire and that’ll shut them in due course’), extracts the bit that looks like a principle of statesmanship, or at any rate the sort of thing would-be statesmen claim to embody, not least because it’s less explicitly self-centred – ‘put up with hostility when you’re pursuing a noble goal’ – and then applies it in an entirely private context. 

It’s not what Pericles meant, and it’s certainly not what T. meant. Is the statement assumed to be universally true regardless of context, or that just doesn’t matter? We can be pretty sure P was familiar with whole text, given his use of it in various of his biographies rather than just coming across a quote that suits his purposes . But clearly doesn’t care. Did his readers? 

And then the translators, at least in the two instances I’ve seen – the Waterfield even more than the Cole – seem to read the quote as P intended, as a private moral injunction that is directly relevant to the issue of how a true friend should be willing to put up with resentment when he fulfils the duty of ‘frank speech’ in pointing out poor behaviour. It’s as if they haven’t looked at T’s original text to get a sense of the context of the line and the preceding words which would normally shape how we interpret it, and hence to recognise that perhaps it doesn’t fit perfectly, but have translated it in a way that makes perfect sense in the context of Plutarch’s discussion. Put another way; you couldn’t transfer these renditions of T’s quoted works back into Pericles’ speech – it would make no sense at all. 

I can see the logic – these are translations of Plutarch quoting T, not of T directly – but it does make T’s phrase even more free-floating and malleable than P was already trying to do. 

Second example goes even further in this direction. ‘To keep a feast is nothing more than to do one’s duty.” Not at first sight terribly plausible, and initial searches don’t produce anything in any text of Thucydides – but they do identify a passage from the third-century CE Christian scholar and ascetic Origen, in his famous polemic against a pagan critic of Christianity, the Contra Celsum, 8.21, where he’s opposing the idea that Christians should take part in public feasts in honour of the gods, or demons as Origen thinks of them. 

If the so-called public festivals can in no way be shown to accord with the service of God, but may on the contrary be proved to have been devised by man when occasion offered to commemorate some human events, or to set forth certain qualities of water or earth, or the fruits of the earth – in that case, it is clear that those who wish to offer an enlightened worship to the divine being will act according to sound reason, and not take part in the public feasts. For ‘to keep a feast’, as one of the wise men of Greece has well said, ‘is nothing else than to do one’s duty’, and that man truly celebrates a feast who does his duty and prays always, offering up continually bloodless sacrifices in prayer to God.

In one modern edition, that wise man is identified as Thucydides; and searching for key words in Origen’s Greek comes up something resembling the phrase; it’s from 1.70.8, the speech of the Corinthians at the congress at Sparta, describing the Athenians as people who are always active and restless; in Hammond’s translation, ‘their only idea of a holiday is to do what they have to do’. It continues; ‘For them the quiet of inactivity is a greater affliction than the burden of business. It would be a fair summary to say that it is in their nature to have no quiet themselves and to deny quiet to others.’ 

O’s passage is not an exact quotation of the original; whereas T has μήτε ἑορτὴν ἄλλοτι ἡγεῖσθαι ἢ τὸ τὰ δέοντα πρᾶξαι – they do not consider a festival as anything other than doing what is necessary – O has Ἑορτὴ” γάρ, ὥς φησι τὶς καὶ τῶν ἑλληνικῶν σοφῶν καλῶς λέγων, “οὐδὲν ἄλλο ἐστὶν ἢ τὸ τὰ δέοντα πράττειν, a feast…is nothing other than doing what is necessary, turning it into a statement about feasts rather than about how the Athenians regard feasts, and a statement with which his readers are expected to agree rather than take as a criticism. (Sorry about the variable fonts, but the WordPress app hates my old iPad at the moment).

As with the Plut passage discussed earlier, putting this English version back into T’s text wouldn’t make much sense – but here that’s because of Origen’s rewriting, which the translator simply follows. How familiar was O with Thucydides? He certainly cites a range of classical Greek authors – earlier in the same book he referred to the story in Herodotus about the Lacedaemonians refusing to prostrate themselves before the king of Persia because they owed allegiance to the law of Lycurgus instead – but not clear whether he’s read the whole text, which in this case he’s misremembering or paraphrasing/rewriting to suit his purpose, or has simply heard the line somewhere. Were lines from T about different topics already circulating as isolated snippets of wisdom, totally removed from their original context or meaning? 

Don’t expect to encounter these quotes very often, not least because they’re a lot more specialised and therefore less generally useful. But striking that phenomenon of treating T as an authority, even on things he didn’t write about, was an ancient thing not just a modern one. With O in particular, a line gets decontextualised and reworked in order to put the weight of classical Greek wisdom behind an idea, regardless of anachronism; loses the political dimension, extracted from specific Athenian context or references, taken into sphere of religion or personal relations. 

The modern habit of using lines from the funeral oration line – ‘the secret of happiness is freedom and the secret of freedom is courage’ – to advertise meditation classes, wellness courses etc suddenly seems much less jarring and new…