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‘The Customary Meanings of Words were Changed’ – Or were they? A Note on Thucydides 3.82.4

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

John Wilson
John Wilson
Affiliation:
Oxford
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Extract

All editors and translators that I know of render the first part of this passage along the lines of ‘They changed the usual meanings of words‘. Thus Weil and Romilly talk of ‘le sens usuel des mots’,1 Stahl of ‘usitatam vocabulorum significationem’,2 Bloomfield of ‘the accustomed acceptation of names’;3 the most popular modern English translation gives ‘words... had to change their usual meanings’,4 and the best-known modern commentary the phrase in my title – ‘the customary meanings of words were changed’.5 The passage is widely quoted, not only by ancient historians but also by sociologists and philosophers; and one suspects the excitement of this translation to be at least a part-cause of the passage's fame. Comparisons are made with modern propaganda, Orwell's 1984, and so on. But this translation must be wrong; unfortunately for generations of believers, though fortunately for the reputation of Thucydides, who would otherwise be saddled with a nonsensical piece of writing.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , May 1982 , pp. 18 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association1982

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References

1 Edition of 1967 (Paris), ad loc.

2 Edition of 1876–85 (Leipzig), ad loc.

3 Edition of 1842 (London), ad loc.

4 Rex Warner in his Penguin Classics translation (1976), p. 242.

5 Gomme, A. W., A Historical Commentary on Thucydides (Oxford, 1956), ii. 384.Google Scholar

6 ibid. Cf. Aristophanes' Clouds 847, and Lysias 10. 17, where the meaning seems to be something like ‘accept as normal’, in a context where it may be descriptions of things (not things themselves) which are thus accepted.

7 Isaiah 5.20.

8 Rex Warner, ibid.

9 John T. Hogan, p. 139 of ‘The άξήωσις of words at Thucydides 3. 82. 4’, GRBS21 (1980), 139–50.

10 ibid. p. 143.

11 ibid. p. 146.

12 Gomme, ibid. p. 374.