Sphinx

‘The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.’ I spend so much time thinking of ways to correct this misattributed Thucydides quote politely and constructively, and occasionally noting the context (a lot of “We need a President who lifts!” this year…), that I rarely take the time to think about it in its own right, or why it has such a powerful appeal to some people.

It’s worth noting, for example, the effect of the simultaneous simplification of Butler’s original statement and its decontextualisation. In a biography of General Charles Gordon, the focus is clearly on the exceptional qualities of Gordon compared with his fellow officers, with a small dig at the society that didn’t expect such erudition and public spirit from its military officers, and a wider anxiety in Butler’s mind about the impact of the professionalisation of the army, especially at command level. In today’s usage, it tends to be far more commonly used to disparage mere intellectuals as useless cowards; simply by quoting such an eminent authority, the weightlifter or gym bro has demonstrated that he does not suffer from any such division of physical and intellectual pursuits.

This isn’t universal; one of the reasons the quote continues to circulate is that, so far as I can gather, the weight-lifting community periodically argues about whether or not physical development is enough – there was a flurry last month when the loathsome Andrew Tate declared the pointlessness of all books and book-learning and was widely denounced on the Twitter. As with ‘The secret to happiness is freedom, and the secret to freedom is courage’, the line has become a lifestyle and self-improvement meme rather than being focused on the organisation of Professional Military Education as it was for most of the twentieth century.

The other thing that struck me this morning is the temporal aspect. The quote is seen partly as a timeless truth that Thucydides and/or the Greeks recognised but we have forgotten, and partly as a classical Greek truth that explains their greatness (generally illustrated with pictures of Spartans, to add a little extra cognitive dissonance) that we need to rediscover. Either way, this explains why it is so important for some people (by no means all) that it is attributed to Thucydides, who of course himself is held to embody the warrior-scholar ideal.

But it’s a ‘timeless truth’ that relates to a specifically modern anxiety, that of excessive specialisation. One of the arguments I try to use with stubborn adherents of the ‘you can’t prove it wasn’t Thucydides’ persuasion is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense in a fifth-century context, especially not in Athens where every citizen would be expected to fight to defend the city in one way or another. There were professional soldiers in a sense – mercenaries, whether career soldiers-for-hire or people like Xenophon looking for something to do after being exiled for dubious political activity – but no one worried about their education. There were scholars who didn’t fight – a resident alien like Aristotle, say – but again, no one saw this as the sort of social-cultural issue that needed warning against.

To deploy the quote in this manner, we have to assume that Thucydides anticipated a problem or anxiety that was irrelevant to his world but would become pressing in the distant future. Perhaps this brings to mind the sort of obsessing about the threat of future super intelligent AI that consumes various self-important tech bros – but again, this mode of thinking, the assumption that the future will be radically different from past and present and so we need to predict or anticipate as-yet-unknown dangers, is distinctively modern (Reinhard Koselleck says hi!).

This is not to argue that we can’t explore the application of Thucydides to different aspects of the modern world that he couldn’t possibly have known about (or the book I’m struggling to write on What Thucydides Knew would be extremely short and dull). Rather, the point is the precise nature of the claim we make and the way we invoke him as an authority; the difference between ‘T’s analysis of stasis at Corcyra suggests general principles of polarisation and rhetorical escalation’, and ‘T predicted how social media would undermine norms of democratic discourse’. The first ascribes to him some significant insight into political dynamics; the second requires a time machine.