Take On Me

It is clear evidence for the growth and development of BlueSky as a social media platform that the Thucydides misquoters have started to arrive – I had to correct two misattributions of the familiar ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote in the last week. I continue to wonder whether this is sufficient incentive to set up an iteration of the Thucydiocy bot there rather than continue to do it in my own name (I’m no longer running a proper experiment as to whether people respond better to corrections from a supposedly automated system rather than from a credentialed academic, but am very conscious that the latter looks weird and obsessive on my part).

There’s still no real comparison; on Ex-Twitter I would need a sign for ‘x Hours Since Last Misattribution’, whereas here it’s a matter of days or weeks. A lot fewer people on BlueSky, so it’s still a niche place focused on conversation, whereas one thing that really drove Thucydiocy on the bird site was the idea (energetically pushed by low-rent social media management firms) that everyone needed to have an account and to build up followers as a business move, and that the way to do this was by tweeting lots of memorable quotes. It’s also likely that methods for building up followers are now a bit more sophisticated – and of course there is a rather different crowd on BlueSky, with (as yet) fewer military veterans and red-pilled body-builders, two groups that seem to be especially fond of the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ line.

This does mean that BlueSky rarely offers anything very interesting in this line – which is of course good for other areas of my (quasi-)academic activities – whereas Ex-Twitter continues to delight. In the last few days, for example, there have been two nice examples of the uselessness of GenAI; firstly, another entirely fake bit of ancient Greek offered as the original for a quote that definitely isn’t found in the Melian Dialogue (sadly the poster concerned deleted the thread rather than confirm that this was their source, but I am pretty certain – Thucydides’ text is on the internet, so a passage of dodgy-looking Greek that produces no hits in a Google search is ipso facto not from Thucydides), and secondly the insistence of Grok that the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote is from Mao, possibly referencing Thucydides – I’m much obliged to @siabaaLee for posting the screenshots.

I also had a really interesting exchange with @runthedigits, after they attributed “It is more blessed to give than to receive” to Thucydides as well as Acts 20:35. This seemed so utterly implausible that it had to be a joke, especially as the same tweet offered “Kick against the pricks” as both Dionysus in the Bacchae and Acts 25:14, but it turns out – and this is the sort of rabbit-hole I cannot resist – that there is a whole tradition of academic discussion on the possible relationship between Thucydides and St Paul.

In Acts 20:35, Paul closes an address with “It is more blessed to give than to receive” as a saying of Jesus. The problem is that this line is not found anywhere in the Gospels. The idea that this might just have been a saying of Jesus that didn’t make it into the Gospels seems to have been quite unpopular in various traditions of biblical exegesis – perhaps because the author of Acts is often take to have been the author of Luke’s gospel as well, so why didn’t he include it there? Casting around for alternative sources, Ernst Haenchen (Die Apostelgeschichte, 5th edn, Göttingen, 1965, 526-7) came across Thucydides 2.97, which indicates in passing that the custom of the Persians was similar (in order to contrast this with the behaviour of a Thracian tribe, the Odrysians, who prefer to receive rather than give and who regard asking but not receiving as less shameful than failing to give having been asked). Maybe, Haenchen argued, Luke/Paul/Jesus was echoing a traditional Greek proverb, and the formulation of it offered by Thucydides was especially influential, which is why the Acts version seems so close in its wording to his.

Well… As John J. Kilgallen (1993: ‘Acts 20:35 and Thucydides 2.97.4’, Journal of Biblical Literature 112.2: 312-314) noted, this seems implausible on multiple counts: none of the other Greek phrases/proverbs quoted by Haenchen bear much resemblance to either Thuc or Acts, and the whole point of T’s account is that it’s not a Greek but a Persian principle, which in any case he offers only in order to draw out the idiosyncrasies of Thracian customs. (For some reason no one seems to be terribly interested in the possible influence of Persian rather than Greek moral thought on early Christianity…). The idea is found in other early Christian texts (see John-Christian Eurell (2021), ’The saying attributed to Jesus at Acts 20:35’, JGRChJ 17: 196-204 for recent research in this area), which might suggest that it was widely attributed to Jesus at the time even if it didn’t make it into the gospels, or at any rate that no one objected if Paul/Luke misattributed it to him.

Two things really struck me about this whole debate. The first is the sheer weirdness of Thucydides getting pulled into it at all, or at any rate in such an emphatic way; I can imagine him being mentioned as one of many references in a general discussion of Greek attitudes towards what ancient historians might call reciprocity and gift-giving (though a lot less obvious than many others), but the claim that he is in some way a key source, let alone the actual origin of the idea, seems to derive from a specific approach to scholarship (particular to old-fashioned German biblical studies, maybe?) that focuses obsessively on specific phrases and wording repeated between different texts. Intertextuality for Dummies? Thucydides from this perspective is merely a collection of Greek words, part of a corpus of Greek words that can be searched for echoes of the Christian phrase, rather than being taken seriously or even considered as a discrete text (at which point one might have started to wonder whether this was a plausible source for a saying of Jesus).

Secondly, it’s an interesting example of the mis-reception of academic articles in non-academic discourse. @runthedigits cited Thucydides in connection with Acts because of an online discussion about the latter quote (here), noting its absence from the gospels, in which one contributor cited the Kilgallen article as suggesting that Thucydides might be the source. But of course this is a partial, and inaccurate, account of Kilgallen, who summarises Haenchen’s claims about Thucydides not to promote them as true but as a basis for then showing that they’re implausible.

This is something I have seen with some of my students; they tend sometimes to take an author’s summary of someone else’s argument as an endorsement or development of that argument, rather than either as a neutral account of the state of scholarly debate or as a deliberate scene-setting for a demolition job. Maybe these summaries are sometimes too scrupulously neutral; more likely, the subtle disparagement is largely invisible to non-specialists. But if it’s invisible to students, it sure as hell is going to be invisible to AI summarisers… Expect more of this sort of misrepresentation. In the meantime, I look forward to finding more parallels between Thucydides and the New Testament.