I Spy…

…with my little eye, something that looks rather like generative AI. It’s been quite a while since the last new ‘Thucydides’ quote on Ex-Twitter (where @Thucydiocy remains active, though my personal account is now dormant). Activity there has focused recently on a couple of lengthy and highly entertaining discussions of the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote – one person insistent that because the line was also quoted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk then both he and William F. Butler must have been quoting the same ancient source (went silent when asked for Ataturk reference, plus fact that he was born just eight years before the publication of Butler’s book so if he did use the line it’s not exactly impossible for him to have read it in Butler), and one who appears to have an almost religious faith in the veracity of Goodreads, convinced that the Thucydiocy Bot is either genuinely a bot or is possibly a teenager. So, many thanks to an article by one Riva-Melissa Tez in The Spectator World, bemoaning the fact that even Trump may not adequately destroy democracy in the interests of libertarian Musk groupies (say what you like about The Spectator, but it does generate a lot of material for studies of stupid right-wing appropriations of the classical):

We are so much worse off than the Athenians during their similar stages of decline. Thucydides once wrote, “The Athenians, who were the most democratic of all the Greeks, were also the most prone to make mistakes, for they were always in a hurry to decide, and were swayed by the emotions of the moment.” The political satire of the poets in Athenian theaters heavily influenced the city’s political decisions, just as TikTok and the Guardian sway millions of malleable minds now. I wrote this in my last political lament in 2020, and I repeat it now — at least the Greeks had Euripides!

That quote – both the whole thing, and chunks of it large enough to be distinctive – is that rare thing, something which produces just a single result in multiple search engines, namely the article in which it appears. That suggests not just that it’s not an actual quote, but also that it’s not someone else’s paraphrase either (at first glance, I assumed it was going to be taken from V.D. Hanson’s introduction to the Landmark Thucydides or something similar, which quite regularly get circulated as actual quotes – but they are easy to Google).

The thing is, all the components of that line ring more or less true, mostly as things said by different characters in Thucydides’ account. I’m not entirely sure about ‘most democratic of all the Greeks’, but ‘most prone to make mistakes as always in a hurry’ looks like a variant of 3.42 crossed with 1.78 plus the Corinthians’ characterisation of the Athenians as always restless and active, and the point about being swayed by emotions in the moment echoes both Cleon in the Mytilene Debate and Nicias in the Sicilian Debate.

What you don’t get is all these ideas compiled into a single critique of Athens and its democracy, conveniently encapsulating a lesson for the present about why autocracy is necessary and how it’s really unfair that people stopped talking to the author at parties. It could certainly be someone’s interpretation of why Thucydides thinks Trump needs to win, but in that case it would surely appear in search results. No, either Riva-Melissa Tez has made this up herself, or – and this seems more likely to me, given that a compilation of different things that people regularly say about Thucydides is exactly what you would expect to be given – she’s asked ChatGPT for a suitable quote. A quick online search reveals that she was heavily into AI start-ups back in 2017…

Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, I have asked for a reference via Ex-Twitter, and firmly expect to be ignored. But I will update here if I do get a response. Meanwhile, I wonder whether a reflection on Thucydides Book 8 – democracy votes to abolish itself – would be at all useful as a means of responding to current events…