Just An Illusion

Update from the Thucydiocy Bot: Ex-Twitter is now really, really boring. Yes, there are still a few people posting the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote to make the same old points about jacked librarians, and a fair amount of boilerplate ‘strong do what they want’ Realism, but there hasn’t been anything interesting – a decent argument, let alone a new misquotation – for six months or more. When someone posted the old image of three students in random graduation outfits, it actually created a little warm feeling, thinking of the old days when the Thucydides musattributions seemed never-ending.

The one positive – and we can thank the advent of generative AI for this – is that the illustrations are sometimes a lot funnier, because Dall-E and their ilk seem to get rather carried away when given a prompt like, I guess, ‘An ancient scholar-warrior’.

Where do we start? The improbable musculature? The bulging, muscled armour? The fact that it’s a sort of Roman rather than a Greek? The peculiar object that he’s holding in his three-fingered right hand? Or the fact that he’s in a library full of nicely-bound codices, that must date to the eighteenth century at the earliest..?

Perhaps the prompt was ‘an ancient time-travelling scholar-warrior’…