Sphinx

It’s been a quiet fortnight on Thucydides Twitter – if you discount the 2000-odd P.G. Wodehouse bots continuing to pump out incomprehensible adverts for something that may or may not be linked to World Cup betting. The Social Jukebox bots that used to offer dodgy quotations have vanished, either because they’ve been closed down or because they decided that Space Karen’s far-right takeover was bad for their image; one weight-lifting account announced that ‘We need a President who lifts’, with the inevitable result of a couple of people bringing out the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote, and a couple of far-right and/or bot provocateur accounts with Thucydides handles have been churning out ghastliness, but that’s about it – with one minor but interesting exception.

“Man is the most important thing, and everything else is the fruit of man’s labor.” Huh? Vaguely reminiscent of Protagoras rather than Thucydides. Very few results from a google search – but one of them looks like a very likely source: a translation of a Chinese article on ‘The Basis of Human Rights in Early Ancient Greek philosophy’ by one Bo Zhenfeng. This indicates that these are supposedly the words of Pericles, but the reference is to a Chinese translation by Xie Defeng, published in Beijing in 1960 – and, massively unhelpfully, the citation is a page reference in that edition, rather than a specific point in Thucydides’ text. Obviously it’s interesting to have confirmation of the existence of at least one such translation into Chinese…

…but it does leave me having to guess which bit of T. has been translated in this manner. I must admit this had me completely stumped, after reading through the three speeches of Pericles in Crawley, Hammond and Mynott – plenty of mention of ‘men’ in different contexts, but nothing that really fits that statement. So, I resorted to sending out a plea to colleagues with relevant knowledge and expertise, and the answer came promptly back from Dr Guo Zilong at the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilisations in Changchun, via Sven Günther.

It turns out that Xie’s translation was based on Rex Warner’s Penguin Classics version – and that this is one of the points where Warner gets distinctly imaginative. 1.143.5, towards the end of Pericles’ first speech, where he’s assuring the Athenians that there is no real risk to them in going to war with Sparta. I’d looked at this phrase, and thought, nah, not close enough. Crawley has “We must cry not over the loss of houses and land but of men’s lives; since houses and land do not gain men, but men them.” Hammond: “Property is the product, not the producer of men.” Mynott: “Men give us these possessions, the possessions do not give us men.” Warner: “Men come first, the rest is the fruit of their labour.”

Yes, the underling point is in the same general ballpark, but Warner is quite a long way from the Greek; it’s one of Thucydides’ neat little phrases (actually one of the neatest I know), literally “not these things (nom.) men (acc.), but men (nom.) these things (acc.) procure/supply/get”. “Men come first” is an interpretation or gloss, rather than a translation; and “man is the most important thing” – assuming for the moment that this is what Xie’s translation says, rather than being the rest of the translation of Bo’s essay into English – is a step further away, as it shifts from Warner’s sense that this is partly about chronological precedence (men, who then created things) to an idea of a hierarchy of importance alone (men, who are more important than things).

Positively, this gives me a little more knowledge of the reception history of Thucydides in China; someone thought it worthwhile to translate Warner’s translation within six years of its publication. Incidentally, it was Xie’s translation that dispensed with chapters, rather than an issue with Bo’s citation practice…