Some discoveries are huge, significant, epoch-making – the sort of event that gets mythologised, dramatised, reimagined and turned into a Doctor Who Is Trying To Brainwash Our Children With Wokeness social media race row. Others are smaller, more specialised, of little wider interest, but still worth celebrating as the product of graft and flashes of inspiration. And then there are my intermittent investigations into Thucydides misquotations, which might get more attention if I presented them as a bit of performance art, fully inhabiting the character of an obsessive pedant with weird obsessions rather than just flirting with it. But the little rush of endorphins and sense of relieved satisfaction that I occasionally get from them is real.
As I’ve remarked on here before, it is much easier to demonstrate that a quote is not from Thucydides if I can establish where it actually is from, and show that there is no plausible Thucydides connection. Otherwise, there is always the theoretical possibility that somewhere out there is a translation that I haven’t encountered yet, rendering the Greek in an idiosyncratic but not actually wrong manner that has then been decontextualised and disseminated. Even if I am absolutely certain that this isn’t the case, it’s still nice to track down the exact route whereby a bit of pseudo-Thucydiana has entered the discourse.
One misattribution that’s been bugging me for a very long time – I first posted about it back in 2015 – is the one that gets regularly cited by wine companies: “The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine.” As I noted then, the key source in English is the wine writer Hugh Johnson, who used the line both in his classic Vintage: the story of wine (1989) and in various short pieces – which have since been plagiarised by newspaper articles on the subject.
Johnson didn’t do footnotes, so there was no indication of where he might have got this idea. What he did offer, as I found when I finally got hold of a hard copy of the Vintage book, was a bibliography, and this included one obvious candidate for the source of his information about classical Greece: Raymond Billiard, La vigne dans l’antiquité (Lyon, 1913). The only online version I could find of this was horrendously badly scanned so entirely useless, but thanks to Dimitri van Limbergen I got a pdf early this summer and could search it for relevant words and phrases. Result: nothing. No Thucydides, no references to barbarism. Dead end.
However… In my attempts at tracking down a copy of Billiard, I had also sent an email to the great Jean Andreau, partly on the basis that a French academic, however long retired, might have easy access to French publications, and partly because I couldn’t find any contact details for the great André Tchernia – a French academic specialising in the history of wine, even better! – and I had met both of them decades ago at a conference on Capri. I heard nothing, until last month, when I had a reply from Jean; neither he nor André had been able to verify if the phrase was found in Billiard, but he had consulted the Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines of Daremberg & Saglio – the French Pauly-Wissowa, if you haven’t encountered the DAGR before – and there, early in the entry on Vinum (p.912 in the edition I looked at; 1919), it was:
In the main text: “Viticulture is the indication of an advanced civilisation”. Footnote 10: “For Thucydides, the Greeks emerged from barbarism when they knew how to make plantations (1,2)”. It’s quite nice to have confirmation of my intuition that 1.2 must be the passage being misrepresented in the Johnson quote. No, Thucydides doesn’t exactly say this; his point is that the very early Hellenes were pastoralists, grazing the land rather than cultivating it, because of the constant threat of being pushed off it by a stronger group. Vines, olives and agriculture in general are indeed associated with a more developed stage, with the growth of settlements and walls, but they seem to me to be presented as symptoms or consequences of this ‘emergence from barbarism’. This article could be read in that sense; the English translation in Johnson makes the adoption of viticulture seem much more like a cause of the development.
So, is this the critical moment? The footnote cites a 1911 article by Pierre Vidal de la Blache – a name that rang a bell – on ‘Les genres de vie dans la géographie humaine’ (Annales de géographie 112) – but there’s no mention of Thucydides there (he’s not big on footnotes), and only a vague reference to the fact that the Greeks regarded wheat flour, wine and (olive) oil as markers of civilisation. The invocation of Thucydides seems to be the innovation of the author of the DAGR article, one A. Jardé, whom I assume must be the Auguste Jardé, 1876-1927, who wrote several books on Greek history including La Grèce antique et la vie grecque (Paris, 1914), a dinky little handbook/dictionary of classical Greece for school students and the general reader, and the much more substantial La formation du peuple grec (Paris, 1923). I’ve yet to find a full digital copy of the French version of the latter, but in the 1926 translation by M.R. Dobie (Kegan Paul, part of a series on The History Of Civilization), we find this on p.43:
On the one hand, it’s a more accurate paraphrase of Thucydides than in the DAGR article; on the other, it seems too much of a coincidence that the same passage gets quoted in this general context. So it does look to me that Jardé came up with the idea for the 1919 article and then – perhaps having been yelled at by irritated Thucydides specialists, or having simply re-read the passage – quietly modified or clarified his claim when it came to his own monograph. Certainly this can’t be the source of Johnson’s quote, which was surely rather translated from the DAGR.
All I’ve managed to find out so far about Jardé comes from the frontispiece of his 1914 book: trained in both history and geography, former member of the École française à Rome, teacher at the Lycée Lakanal (in Sceaux, in the metropolitan region of Paris). But, as with the now thoroughly obscure William F. Butler, his work lives on, albeit uncredited. I can now go ahead and add a new entry to the Misattributed section of the Thucydides Wikiquote page…
Incidentally, one of the things this bit of research has brought home to me is quite how rubbish Google is these days, in a too-clever-by-half sort of way. If I search for Jardé, that’s what I’m looking for – not a load of results for Jared (even when I added “-Jared” to the string it refused to believe me). The helpful “is this what you meant to write?” has slipped into “you can’t possibly have meant that” – our mechanical servitors now basically assume that we’re all idiots who can’t type accurately. And even the most precise framing of a query generates huge quantities of useless crap, in which are buried one or two useful results. I’m tempted to say that I can see why my students are turning to ChatGPT instead, as some of them explained in focus groups last week. Although ‘Who was Auguste Jardé and what are the most important aspects of his work?’ generates the following less than helpful result, which as far as I can see is entirely fictional:
Auguste Jardé (1845-1934) was a French historian and academic known for his research on the history of France during the 18th and 19th centuries. His most important work was his eight-volume “Histoire de la Révolution française” (History of the French Revolution), published between 1895 and 1904. Jardé’s research challenged the prevalent Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution and instead focused on the political and social dynamics of the Revolution. He argued that the Revolution was not a purely class struggle, but rather a complex interplay of various factors, including ideology, economic interests, and political power. Jardé also conducted extensive research on the origins of the French Revolution, tracing its roots back to the Enlightenment and the Ancien Régime. He emphasized the role of intellectual and philosophical ideas in shaping the revolutionary movement. Additionally, Jardé wrote extensively on the Napoleonic era, publishing several works on Napoleon’s reign and its impact on Europe. He also studied the Bourbon Restoration and the rise of nationalism in Europe. Jardé’s historical research was characterized by a rigorous analysis of primary sources and a nuanced understanding of the political and social dynamics of the periods he studied. He is considered a prominent figure.
As an experiment, try Googling Jardé in another browser, or on someone else’s device: when I try it, I get scores of Jardés and no Jareds.