Sphinx

Something even weirder than normal is happening on Thucydides Twitter. I hesitate to use the word ‘invasion’ because of its association with the UK government’s racist anti-migrant rhetoric, but certainly I feel like a scientist in the opening act of one of those movies, puzzled by the suddenly anomalous behaviour of the pond snails he’s been studying, not realising that this is just one small segment of a rapid montage, the dots that will not be joined by anyone except the viewer until Act Two…

For the last week, the results of my regular searches for mentions of ‘Thucydides’ – mainly but not solely for the purpose of correcting misattributions and misquotations – has been dominated by a lot of very similar and very puzzling tweets, along these lines: fragments of unknown text mentioning Thucydides but not actually making any sense, with the main event being short videos that simply flash up incomprehensible phrases.

The user handles of the tweeting accounts are long strings of Chinese or (I think) sometimes Korean characters, neither of which I read, and the avatars follow the same pattern, so initially I thought this was the work of just a couple of them, tweeting in rapid succession. However, a couple of days ago I got sick of them clogging my feed and started deploying the Mute button – and discovered that they were actually all different, but all tweeting the same things. One day I muted 35, the next 37. Many of the user names are classic bot names – @sandra165356898654 – though some look on the face of it more like real people; they’ve all been created in the last few weeks, and one can only conclude that Space Karen’s attempts at expelling spambots from the platform are experiencing a certain lack of success…

Why are they here? It is not, I think, about the bits of English text in themselves. The fragments relating to Thucydides (taken, as I’ll discuss below, from an obscure early P.G. Wodehouse story, of all things) don’t convey any coherent message; if you look at the full feed of one of these bots, it is not (as I initially wondered) tweeting successive extracts from a single text, but rather entirely disconnected fragments from heaven knows where. My guess is that they simply require some text – maybe even specifically English text – to be recognised as a legitimate tweet, or to be permitted to tweet stuff on a metronomic basis, since each tweet will be different. Others who properly understand this stuff may be able to clarify; I believe there are currently a lot of former Twitter software engineers with a bit of time on their hands.

So, Thucydides – and the contents of non-Thucydides tweets from the same bots – is not the point. Presumably advertising is – but what? I’ve tried running some of the other text through Google Translate, and it mostly declares itself baffled. There are hashtags relating to FIFA and to cryptocurrency and NFTs and to online games, and links to websites which mostly either can’t be found or my web browser screams with terror at the thought of visiting, but one of which seemed to be about basketball. Is this all about sports betting? Anyone any idea? Who would actually see these tweets if they weren’t searching for ‘Thucydides’ (which is, I believe, something of a minority pursuit)?

The joyous aspect of this whole thing – yes, this may be less important than possible evidence of demons in the internet – is the discovery of a previously unknown source for Thucydides reception. The text being mined by the bot engine is an early story by P.G. Wodehouse, ‘A Shocking Affair’, first published in 1903 in his collection of school stories Tales of St Austin’s. Now, I will admit to having quite enjoyed some of Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings and Darbishire books in my childhood, in the days when I had the leisure to read voraciously and indiscriminately, but mostly I find the genre tedious if not downright sinister, and the idea that it was once massively popular among adult readers is frankly rather alarming. We can all feel very relieved that Wodehouse decided he wasn’t particularly good at at, and turned to comic fiction instead.

‘A Shocking Affair’ focuses on a cunning wheeze to get out of a Greek exam without getting into trouble. The boy Bradshaw fails to turn up, but is later heard behind the door of the school’s science museum, the handle of which has somehow become charged with electricity; two masters get a shock trying to open it, a third uses a piece of paper to insulate himself; Bradshaw is excused for not being able to get out, and later admits that of course he knew that paper doesn’t conduct electricity; the narrator reflects that he has had to endure the exam but on the other hand got to see the masters getting shocked.

If Bradshaw had not been in the Museum, he might have seen Gerard jump six feet, which would have made him happy for weeks. On second thoughts, though, that does not work out quite right, for if Bradshaw had not been in the Museum, Gerard would not have jumped at all. No, better put it this way. I was virtuous, and I had the pleasure of witnessing the sight I have referred to. But then there was the Thucydides paper, which Bradshaw missed but which I did not. No. On consideration, the moral of this story shall be withdrawn and submitted to a committee of experts. Perhaps they will be able to say what it is.

The story is basically terrible, and I recommend it to nobody unless you really like that sort of thing. To be fair, Wodehouse also thought it was a failure. But it does offer evidence for the teaching of Thucydides in English private schools at the end of the 19th century.

Our form read two authors a term, one Latin and one Greek. It was the Greek that we feared most. Mellish [the classics teacher] had a sort of genius for picking out absolutely untranslatable passages, and desiring us (in print) to render the same with full notes. This term the book had been Thucydides, Book II., with regard to which I may echo the words of a certain critic when called upon to give his candid opinion of a friend’s first novel, “I dare not say what I think about that book.”

It’s not just Thucydides, it’s the fact that Mellish goes out of his way to make the end-of-term exam as difficult as possible, that leads Bradshaw to adopt an alternative approach to the night-before-the-exam cramming.

“Bradshaw,” I said, as I reached page 103 without having read a line, “do you know any likely bits?”

Bradshaw looked up from his book. He was attempting to get a general idea of Thucydides’ style by reading Pickwick.

“What?” he said.

I obliged with a repetition of my remark.

“Likely bits? Oh, you mean for the Thucydides. I don’t know. Mellish never sets the bits any decent ordinary individual would set. I should take my chance if I were you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to read Pickwick. Thicksides doesn’t come within a mile of it.”

Is this the earliest recorded instance of someone mocking the unpronounceability of Thucydides’ name? It’s not the best attempt I’ve seen. The description of the exam does offer a few hints of Wodehouse’s mature style – the voice of Bertie Wooster is faintly discernible.

Now I have remarked already that I dare not say what I think of Thucydides, Book II. How then shall I frame my opinion of that examination paper? It was Thucydides, Book II., with the few easy parts left out. It was Thucydides, Book II., with special home-made difficulties added. It was—well, in its way it was a masterpiece. Without going into details,—I dislike sensational and realistic writing,—I may say that I personally was not one of those who required an extra ten minutes to finish their papers, I finished mine at half-past two, and amused myself for the remaining hour and a half by writing neatly on several sheets of foolscap exactly what I thought of Mr Mellish, and precisely what I hoped would happen to him some day. It was grateful and comforting.

I am strongly inclined to think that Wodehouse had actually studied some Thucydides, not so much from this passage as from the remark he attributes to one of the class ‘swots’, who afterwards “wanted to know whether I had adopted Rutherford’s emendation in preference to the old reading in Question 11.” That is a pretty obscure reference, even in 1903, to an 1890 edition of Book IV by the headmaster of Winchester College. Jeeves would certainly have had an opinion on the subject – probably favouring Spratt.

Update: as is my usual practice, I’ve been gradually writing this post in odd moments over the course of a couple of days, feeling reasonably happy that Twitter wasn’t going to collapse before I finished it; I accelerated the pace this morning, as imminent collapse started to feel like a non-zero possibility, and here it is. BUT THE BOTS HAVE ALL VANISHED. Nothing since yesterday morning. Is this when they make their move?

Update: obviously they’ve just started mining a different text. And a couple of new quotes of Wodehouse have just appeared.

Update: I’ve had an interesting exchange on the Twitter with Henry Braun (@htfb) – this is the sort of thing that will make us miss the bird site if/when it goes – noting that Wodehouse’s aim was “to write amusingly but earnestly and without mockery of what, to the audience, are sacred things.” (Yes, and given that I hated school this probably explains my aversion to school stories.) Hence, Henry suggests, we can infer that ‘Thicksides’ is genuine Victorian schoolboy slang not a Wodehouse joke. Interesting idea. So, he did Google, and lo! he came across Dead-Sea Fruit, a 1968 novel by the terrifyingly prolific Mary Elizabeth Braddon – of whom I know nothing, but her 1862 novel Lady Audrey’s Secret has been called “the most sensationally successful of all the sensation novels” by the critic John Sutherland. Sounds better than school stories, anyway… Pp 171-2 in the edition I found online, and the lead character Lucy Alford is busy telling a Mrs Jerningham about one Laurence Desmond, an old acquaintance of her father, in his student days reading for Greats at Henley.. No, I am not planning to read the book to discover who these people are – it doesn’t seem too important (waits for experts in mid-C19 fiction to yell at me):

“Mr Desmond used to say that he could never work well until he had used up his idleness; and he declared that the never felt himself in such good training for cramming Thicksides as after a long day’s punting.”

“Cramming Thicksides!” cried Mars Jermingham, in amazement; “what, in mercy’s name, did he mean by that?”

“Oh, Thicksides is the Oxonian name for Thucydides.”

“How very charming! And at night, when the lamps were lighted, Mr Desmond and your father used to cram Thivksides?”

“Yes, and Cicero; the Philippics, you know, and that sort of thing, and all the Greek tragedies, and Demosthenes, and Mill’s Logic, and the Gospels. I believe Mr Desmond’s friends were both ploughed…”

Well of course that Oxford lot are responsible. I just wonder whether it’s two syllables or three…