Highbrow Advice for Life: Saying What You Mean
Thucydides on the weaponization of language
By Deborah Beck
One evening during my graduate studies in ancient Greek and Roman literature, I was wrestling with a difficult passage from Thucydides, whose challenging and elusive prose style strikes fear into the hearts of ancient Greek students everywhere. His Histories is our most important contemporary source for the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), a conflict that blanketed most of the ancient Greek world in which oligarchic Sparta defeated democratic Athens. As I made my way through this particular section of the Histories, I understood the meanings of the individual Greek words, but try as I might, I couldn’t put them together to understand what Thucydides was saying.
Time passed. My attempts to pin down the relationships between the words failed, and failed, and failed again. Gazing idly out the window of my third-floor walkup apartment, I started questioning the entire situation. “Maybe I will jump out this window and run away to join the circus,” I thought. It is a measure of my dejection that this seemed like a serious and even a desirable career plan.
In the part of the Histories I was reading (Book 3, chapter 82), Thucydides writes about a period early in the Peloponnesian War when civil unrest — stasis, in Greek — engulfed Corcyra, a Greek island settlement just off the coast of what is now Albania. He singles out Corcyra and describes at length what happened there because this was one of the first of many such internal conflicts that broke out across the Greek world during the Peloponnesian War.
After arguing that civil unrest follows consistent patterns not simply among the Greek city-states during the Peloponnesian War but among humankind in general, Thucydides identifies the corruption of language as the first — and implicitly the most harmful — of the weapons used by the Corcyraeans to attack their fellow citizens: “According to their own judgments, they changed the accepted relationships between what words meant and what people did” (chapter 82, section 4). In other words, they used language to dress up unsavory, dangerous, or self-serving actions in the clothing of responsible citizenship.
In the next sentence, Thucydides gives several examples of the Corcyraeans’ weaponization of language. A very literal English translation of this line is, “For courage foolish manliness companion-loving was considered, delay thoughtful cowardice specious, moderation a disguise of unmanliness, and wisdom toward everything lack of initiative for anything.” Back in my graduate school apartment, it was at this point in my reading that I most seriously considered joining the circus.
As I grappled with Thucydides’ confusing prose, I was stumped by the absence of syntax that might organize this pile of abstractions. I was also confused about how to understand the Greek word tolma. I translated it above as “courage,” but it can also mean “recklessness.” Thus, the first Greek word in the sentence can mean both a positive quality of the citizen (bravery, courage) and its destructive inverse (recklessness).
Perplexed by the multiple meanings of tolma, my student self got more and more lost as the sentence’s parade of abstract ideas continued. As the sentence winds on, Thucydides bombards us with a series of abstractions with opposite meanings, held together by only one vague and unhelpful passive verb near the beginning (“was considered”). The sentence presents a series of disingenuously refashioned phrases that the Corcyraean revolutionaries used both to change the appearance of their own wrongdoing and mischaracterize the resistance of citizens who opposed them. To make matters even more confusing, in some cases, the accurate description of what is happening is the positive version, while in others, the true meaning is negative. The passage seems like a linguistic fun house. No wonder I thought of the circus as a plausible alternative.
In Thucydides’ first opposition, the true and “bad” meaning is given first (foolish courage) followed by the made-up “good” meaning that seditious Corcyraeans substituted for it in order to subdue their fellow citizens (companion-loving bravery). But in the next opposition, the “good” meaning given first is the true one (thoughtful delay) and the made-up “bad” one follows it (specious cowardice). Trying to understand connections and ideas that shift almost literally word by word as the sentence proceeds, the reader experiences the anxiety and instability that weaponized language created in the stasis at Corcyra. When is the good also true? When is it a disingenuous fiction? Thucydides’ stylistic choices make that a central issue for both the Corcyraeans and his readers. Thucydides uses language to make readers understand what happened at Corcyra not simply by reading about the events, but by experiencing the feelings caused by civil unrest.
Thucydides was right that changing the meaning of words in self-interested ways is a universal weapon of human conflict. Language changes organically over time in response to what large numbers of speakers do with it, as in the evolution of the meaning of the Greek word stasis. Initially its political meaning was “group, party,” which shifted to “party with seditious intent” and then “revolution.” But the weaponization of language is something else. It is a concerted strategy on the part of specific individuals who want to gain power over others by misrepresenting their own actions.
Today, if asked to name a narrative about totalitarianism, most people would probably say “George Orwell’s 1984.” Although Orwell was the author of many other works, it is this one for which he is best known: the adjective “Orwellian” has come to mean “resembling the futuristic totalitarian state described in 1984.” And in 1984, the use of language to warp reality is a central theme. On the very first page of the novel, the Ministry of Truth displays its slogan on the wall:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
This renaming of something as its opposite — and positioning weaponized language as the first and most crucial tactic of antidemocratic regimes — is just what Thucydides describes at Corcyra. From Thucydides’ Histories to Orwell’s 1984 and beyond, the weaponization of language has been used by antidemocratic forces to impose their will on free societies. Both historical and fictional narratives show us the power of this strategy, as well as our power to resist through insisting on the accurate use of language.
As a graduate student, I grew to understand Latin and Greek — including this challenging passage, which in class sprang sharply into view under the guidance of my Greek professor, the late Albert Henrichs. His insistence on precision and accuracy, and his willingness to treat an intimidated first-year graduate student as a colleague, made me the reader that I am today. But beyond the translation and interpretation of ancient texts, my training as a professional classicist taught me how to use language with clarity and brio to say exactly what I mean and how to share those skills with others.
I regularly think about the masterful combination of clarity and confusion with which Thucydides narrates the stasis at Corcyra, although it no longer makes me consider leaving classics to join the circus. Now I see in his writing a forceful response to the authoritarian double-speak that happened on Corcyra and that continues to bedevil our life and language today. Thucydides simultaneously captures the sense of insecurity created by weaponized language and clears away the obfuscations that such languages creates.
This is something we all can — and should — do. Every time we use language, what we say (or write) shapes the fabric of our society. Clear and accurate language creates a world in which we can trust what other people say, and others can trust us; accepting manipulative or weaponized language, whether from ourselves or from others, weakens the ties that bind our communities together. Our use of language is a way of living our values — as citizens, as family and friends, as neighbors and colleagues, and as human beings.
Deborah Beck is the Christie and Stanley E. Adams, Jr. Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts in UT Austin’s Department of Classics. She is the author of, most recently, The Stories of Similes in Greek and Roman Epic (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and produces the Musings in Greek Literature podcast in collaboration with students.