Talk Thucydides To Me…

No, I haven’t seen the new Wonder Woman film – the reviews I’ve seen so far seem inclined to a position of “crashing disappointment” [ahem. see update below] – but I think I’ve managed to establish the identity of the alleged Thucydides reference without actually having to watch it. I’ve no idea how it plays out in the film, as the screenplay doesn’t seem to be online yet, but as far as the novelisation is concerned, Diana is busy getting smoochy with General Ludendorff, whom she suspects of being the god Ares in disguise…

“Enjoying the party?” Ludendorff asked her.

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “I confess I’m not sure what we’re celebrating tonight.”

“A German victory, of course,” he said with relish.

“Victory?” she echoed. “When I hear peace is so close?” He smiled. “Peace is only an armistice in an endless war.”

It was a famous quotation. Her heart turned over in her chest. She understood what he was saying. And whose words he was using to say them:

“Thucydides,” she replied, referring to the Greek general who had written about the long, terrible war between the Spartans and the Greeks. Mnemosyne, Diana’s last tutor, had forced her to memorize long passages of his work. She had told Diana that Thucydides was one of Hippolyta’s favorites – and by that she meant both the work and the man.

“You know your Ancient Greeks,” he said. “They understood that War is a God. A God that requires human sacrifice.”

Unfortunately, as I discussed in a previous blog post, this line doesn’t actually come from Thucydides; the earliest attribution to him that I’ve yet been able to find is from 1988, when it was painted on one of the walls of the newly-refurbished West Point museum, as one of a set of quotations suggested by the local history department. It does resemble a Napoleon quote (or at least a quote attributed to Napoleon), and much further back it bears a significant resemblance to a line in Plato’s Laws (626a). But Thucydides, as the great realist and historian of war, is so much more appropriate as the source.

In the context of this scene in Wonder Woman, this is in one sense perfect: it instantly reveals that Ludendorff cannot possibly be a genuine Prussian general. Just like the moment in Jo Walton’s The Philosopher Kings when Kebes sings a version of Summertime, it’s clear evidence that supernatural agency is involved; only a god like Ares could know about a fake Thucydides quote from seventy years in the future…

On the other hand, Diana is convinced that she recognises the line, and its author – although, since she also seems to think that the Peloponnesian War was between the Spartans and ‘the Greeks’, we probably don’t need to take her claims to knowledge too seriously [ahem; see update below]. What’s the point in having a magic lasso of truth if you don’t use it for anything useful? Unless she doesn’t bother taking pains to enquire into things or develop any sort of critical sense because she can always have resort to a magical gizmo.

It does all fit with the sense that Thucydides continues to have a worryingly high presence in the wider culture: the prevalence of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ meme with the publication now of Graham Allison’s book-length account, more references from Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull, the recent burst of hyper-crude realism from H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn in the Wall Street Journal on Trump’s foreign policy ‘strategy’ (not directly citing Thuc, admittedly), and the response from David Brooks in the New York Times that he wishes McMaster was a better student of Thucydides.

But all those examples relate to the specific field of international relations, and Thucydides functions there as a kind of status symbol; it’s not that everyone is expected to have heard of him, but that he’s someone you ought to be familiar with if you want to be taken seriously. The Wonder Woman reference feels different, not least because I thought the whole point of the modern blockbuster was to be as non-culturally-specific and accessible as possible. The quote isn’t expected to be familiar (it’s the sort of thing a villainous Prussian general might say), but when Diana recognises it as Thucydides, that’s a signal to the audience – or at least intended to be: exotic, perhaps, but recognisable.

It is perhaps worth noting that Joss Whedon’s original screenplay for Wonder Woman didn’t misquote any Thucydides…

Update 5/6/17, on the basis of various recent conversations. Firstly, apologies to anyone who felt I was being gratuitously unfair to the character of Diana (views not to be taken seriously etc.) when this is clearly an issue with the author of the novelisation (and not the screenplay or the film, which doesn’t say anything about the different sides in the Peloponnesian War) attributing idiotic ideas to her that no genuine Amazon would actually hold. Secondly, it does seem that the reviews I saw may have been less than representative (and maybe too heavily invested in some of the original comics), as generally the film is being well received, and my pedantic quibbling on the specific issue of a dodgy Thucydides reference shouldn’t be held against it.

Thirdly, I’ve had a fascinating exchange with Nick Lowe from Royal Holloway, who was the Greek translator for the film; he comments on how seriously the filmmakers took the idea of Diana as speaker of a hundred languages and wanted to get the lines right, and also suggests a possible rationalisation for the ‘Thucydides’ line:

This film is evidently set in a world which is not ours, as witness the fact that Ludendorff dies twenty years early (for most people a rather more glaring licence than a bit of internet-approved pseudothucydideana), or maybe a copy of Thucydides book 9 in his daughter’s own hand survived in the library of Themyscira…

But of course; and if both Ares and Diana have access to passages of Thucydides not available to anyone else, that offers two different routes whereby that line might have found its way onto the walls of the West Point museum…