Like A Virgin

It’s a sign of the rapid expansion of Bluesky that it now looks as if it’s worth my while searching for ‘Thucydides’ every now and then, in order to wonder whether I should trouble to correct misquotations and misattributions (given that it would be in my own name rather than via the Thucydides Bot). So far, the notorious ‘Scholars and Warriors’ misquote has been referred to twice, once many months ago so not worth bothering with and once when someone records their surprise at discovering that it’s actually by Sir William F. Butler – so this looks promising for the quality of discourse and knowledge on the platform. One person did come up with the extended/remix version of ‘Hope is a dangerous commodity’ (the added sentence from a 1988 biosecurity thriller…). But most interesting was a quote from a recent Aeon essay that had passed me by, on olive oil: “By the 5th century BCE, Thucydides felt he knew what separated civilisation from barbarism: the ability to graft the olive tree.”

I’m not sure how we know that Thucydides felt this, as he doesn’t say anything about it. There’s no reference, only a link to another Aeon essay, by Mark Fisher, that offers a thought-provoking overview of Thucydides but makes no mention of olives. The line, and select phrases from it, gets only the one hit on search engines, the article itself; take away the quote marks and the keywords are so bland and common that it’s impossible to identify possible origins.

I am however pretty confident that the origin of this idea is the Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines edited by C.V. Daremberg and E. Saglio (Paris, 1873-1919), which claimed that “viticulture is the indication of an advanced civilisation” and cited Thucydides: “For Thucydides, the Greeks emerged from barbarism when they knew how to make plantations (1,2).” ‘Plantations’ here can refer to either vines or olive trees; this is the starting-point for the line that now circulates widely in English: “The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine” – it’s just interesting to see that it’s focused on olives for a change, where normally it appears in articles and adverts about wine. Obviously Thucydides didn’t actually say that – he’s focused on the contrast between pastoralism and settled agriculture – and there’s no mention of grafting at all.

Much of the article is a really interesting discussion of the modern production of olive oil, its patchy quality and regulation, and how this all reflects broader economic, technological and social trends. It is written – as the authors of such pieces are encouraged to write, I know from experience – around some personal experiences, viewing the pressing process and learning the skills of olive oil tasting, which are then juxtaposed with the author’s academic expertise in the history and sociology of science. But it’s framed with a couple of paragraphs of historical/mythological waffle that could have been lifted from Wikipedia or generated by AI. Take the paragraph where the Thucydides reference appears:

First domesticated somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, the tree was cultivated by Babylonians, and by the 18th century BCE the Code of Hammurabi regulated the trade in olive oil. The tree steadily inched west, with its main centres of diffusion in Palestine, Syria and Crete. By the 5th century BCE, Thucydides felt he knew what separated civilisation from barbarism: the ability to graft the olive tree. The mythical foundation of Athens begins with the goddess Athena gifting the olive tree to the Greeks. Planting an olive grove was thus a sacred act. Especially revered were those trees whose oil served as prizes for the winners of the Panathenaic Games. In the 4th century BCE, cutting down or uprooting one of those trees could be punished with exile and confiscation of property. To this day in Italy, spilling oil on the table is viewed as a bad omen.

Well… The Code of Hammurabi mentions olive oil as one of various commodities that a merchant might be dealing or a boat owner transporting; “regulated the trade in olive oil” gives the impression of much more focused attention, and I wonder if this simply reflects the fact that someone published a web article five years ago, claiming that this was all about the olive oil trade (no, I am not going to devote any time to tracing the relationship between this and similar but briefer claims on the Filippo Berio Website or whatever. Let some Hammurabi scholar do this). The only source given for any of this material is the Thucydides link mentioned above. Athena gave the olive to the Athenians, not to the Greeks, and there seems to be some confusion about the sacred olive thing and Lysias 7 – and what has that got to do with the Italian custom?

Yes, I’m a pedant, but that self-knowledge doesn’t stop me feeling deeply irritated by this. We’re not being offered a serious history of the olive and its cultivation, but a ragbag of references and anecdotes, of varied reliability and total indifference to whether they’re reliable or not, intended to establish an ‘olives have been materially and symbolically important for nearly four millennia’ point of contrast for the impact of industrial oil production in the 18th century.

A real historical study might have discussed, for example, the evidence for mass production (not just mass consumption) of olive oil in Rome, and the literary and legal evidence for various sorts of dodgy practice in the pursuit of profit. But this isn’t a proper historical study, just a mixture of boilerplate context and rhetorical foil. The article would not in face be materially weakened by cutting the first four paragraphs. Alternatively, if this is being paid by the word, could we have a bibliography and some references?