{"id":89,"date":"2005-09-26T23:56:05","date_gmt":"2005-09-27T03:56:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.3\/~drweevil\/?p=89"},"modified":"2007-09-03T17:07:17","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T21:07:17","slug":"another-bogus-quotation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=89","title":{"rendered":"Another Bogus Quotation?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A recent <a href=\"http:\/\/leiterreports.typepad.com\/blog\/2005\/09\/thus_spoke_thuc.html\">Brian Leiter<\/a> post, in full:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>Thus Spoke Thucydides<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Pericles, in his Funeral Oration to the relatives of dead soldiers: &#8220;It is not possible for people to give fair and just advice to the state, if they are not exposing their own children to the same danger when they advance a risky policy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p align=\"right\">&#8211;Thucydides, <em>History of the Peloponnesian War<\/em><\/p>\n<p>(Thanks to Jim Klagge for the pointer.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I can&#8217;t find anything resembling this quotation in Pericles&#8217; funeral oration (Thuc. 2.35-46), which is on-line <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fordham.edu\/halsall\/ancient\/pericles-funeralspeech.html\">here<\/a> and at numerous other sites in various translations. The words (as opposed to the thought) are hardly distinctive enough for a Greek-word search. Perhaps they are found elsewhere in Thucydides, but the fact that Google comes up dry when I try to find them in any larger context is disquieting. The pseudo-specific reference is also suspicious, since it gives the superfluous title of Thucydides&#8217; only known work, but not the book and chapter numbers necessary to track down what he actually wrote. Should I assume that the quotation is bogus until proved otherwise? Leiter wouldn&#8217;t be the first, or the second, or the hundredth weblogger to fall for a conveniently appropriate fake quotation. I hope he does a better job of footnoting his legal scholarship.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> (9\/28, 11:55pm)<\/p>\n<p>See <a href=\"http:\/\/www.doctorweevil.org\/index.php?p=90\">next post<\/a> for much more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent Brian Leiter post, in full: Thus Spoke Thucydides Pericles, in his Funeral Oration to the relatives of dead soldiers: &#8220;It is not possible for people to give fair and just advice to the state, if they are not exposing their own children to the same danger when they advance a risky policy.&#8221; &#8211;Thucydides, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classics","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}