Posted by NevilleMorley
https://thesphinxblog.com/2026/01/22/space-is-deep/
http://thesphinxblog.com/2026/01/22/space-is-deep/
Once again we find Thucydides at the heart of tangled questions of war, diplomacy and politics, power, life and death. I’m not thinking of Trump’s claim to Greenland/Iceland/Saarland/Greendale/delete as appropriate, or Mark Carney’s bid to claim the (currently dormant) title of Most Thucydides-Quoting Premier from Malcolm Turnbull, but rather of more pressing issues: the conclusion of The Dominion War.
Two days earlier… Prof. Tim Rood of the University of Oxford dropped me an email about a pseudo-/quasi-Thucydides quote that he’d come across (to be more exact, that his mother had come across), wondering if I knew about it:
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Well, I was vaguely aware of it, but had never got round to investigating it properly – partly because it’s less spurious than many, even if it is very different from any of the usual translations of 2.43.3. The second clause is unmistakably drawn from Alfred Zimmern’s widely reprinted version of the funeral oration in The Greek Commonwealth, as to the best of my knowledge the ‘woven’ metaphor doesn’t appear anyone else:
The whole Earth is the Sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven only on Stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men’s lives.
My feeling is that the whole thing is most likely based on Zimmern; his “graven… on stone” language feels close enough to “engraved on stone monuments”, where most translations talk rather of “inscriptions on graves” or similar. Obviously the big shift is the introduction of “what you leave behind” in place of (effectively) “what they leave behind”; suddenly this is a conveniently all-purpose, non-specific bit of aspirational eulogy, rather than relating specifically to those who die fighting for their country. It is no coincidence, it turns out, that Tim’s mother came across the quote at a funeral. A quick internet search reveals a vast number of websites recommending this as a suitable thing to quote at a memorial – and a few universities using it as a slogan for their fund-raising and alumni relations offices. It also pops up in James Kerr’s Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About The Business Of Life (2013).
Where did it come from? This remains an open question, as more or less nobody quoting the line offers more of an attribution than ‘Thucydides’ (or, quite commonly, ‘Pericles’; it appears on his Wikiquote page but not Thucydides’, for example). The one source actually mentioned by anyone is Jeffrey Thompson Parker’s Flicker to Flame: Living with Purpose, Meaning, and Happiness (2006), p.118. This sounds…interesting.
The way to live a life packed with joyful experiences and a content inner peace is revealed in Flicker to Flame. Author Jeff Parker shows us how we have the ability within us to create the lives we have envisioned, to produce the results we desire, or to become the personification of our dreams. Dreams are always delivered gift-wrapped with the ability to make them come true. The effort required to open the present is up to each one of us. Flicker to Flame introduces the Nine Axioms of Happiness to help produce lives with purpose, meaning, and happiness. The Nine Axioms deliver a plan of action to help realize dreams and transform lives from mundane to magnificent. Envision a worthy purpose as a rocket. To launch a rocket, a fuel source is required. The reading, understanding, and implementing the Nine Axioms of Happiness will deliver the fuel necessary to launch lives into the orbit of extraordinary.
In the circumstances, I think I need to be paid danger money to investigate this any further. In fact the text doesn’t seem to be available online anyway, so I’d need to buy the book to check, and I’m certainly not going to do that from my own meagre resources. If enough people click on the ‘Buy me a coffee’ button to cover expenses and buy me a nice cake as well as a coffee, I may reconsider.
In the meantime… I think it’s a reasonable bet that Parker’s aspirational new age twaddle is largely responsible for the popularisation of this line – but I am sure that he didn’t originate it. Searching for key phrases from the quote plus either Pericles or Thucydides from before 2006 yields just one substantive result: a discussion of the final two-part episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, broadcast May/June 1999, which was titled “What You Leave Behind”. That webpage, and subsequent discussions of the episode, are adamant that the title comes from the Pericles line – which must have been familiar enough for the writers to have come across it and decide to reference it (and to be fair it does chime with an episode about final decisions, hopes for legacy, self-sacrifice etc.). A poetry collection titled What We Leave Behind was published in 1996 by Mahendra Solanki, but I haven’t been able to track him down to ask whether he was referencing anything in the title besides the book’s themes.
Obviously what I really wish is that I’d have known about this before writing a chapter about the reception of the funeral oration, as including it would have been (1) relevant, (2) fun and (3) probably very annoying indeed to the editor of the volume. And I’m going to have to think of a strategy for tracking down the story of how Zimmern’s version was simplified and modified to make it more generally applicable.
Postscript: Also worth noting that the memorial service programme included a Greek translation of the quote, presented as if it was original Thucydides. The joys of Google Translate…
https://thesphinxblog.com/2026/01/22/space-is-deep/
http://thesphinxblog.com/2026/01/22/space-is-deep/
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