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sententiae antiquae Profile picture
@sentantiq
Jul 10, 2021 • 24 tweets • 13 min read • Read on X
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#MemePolice

A reminder thread of things #Aristotle did NOT say

1. “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it”

nope.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
2. “A Whole is greater than the sum of its parts”

This really popular misattribution may be a poor translation of the Metaphysics
3. “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” [and many variations thereof]

This one has absolutely no basis. Aristotle says many things about education, this just ain’t one of them.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
4. “We are What we repeatedly do. Excellence is an act, not a habit.”

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
5. “Knowing Yourself is the Beginning of all Wisdom”

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
6. “Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”

This is almost Aristotle. It is mostly Francis Bacon

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
7. “Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation.”

This is totally super-capitalist, corporate double-speak nonsense

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
8. “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”

This one is likely a mistranslation or an attribution of a lost saying by Seneca in On Tranquility of mind.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
“Well-begun is half done”

This is not really Aristotle. The idea is proverbial even when it is kind of quoted by Aristotle. But these words belong to someone else.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
10. “The more you know the more you know you don’t know”

This is clearly a retread of Plato’s Apology 21d:

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
11. “To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do.”

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
12. “No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness”

This is another indirect attribution that probably comes from Seneca De Tranquilitate Animi 10

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
13. "Memory is the scribe of the soul”
Ugh. “scribe”? Soul? This one sounds like it a misunderstanding or a fabrication made to sound old-fashioned.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
14. “It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.”

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
15. “Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society”

The character of this quotation is alien to Aristotle and ancient Greek ideas including using “tolerance” in this way and “dying society”

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
16. “There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
“The end of labor is to gain leisure.”

This shows up in Tyron Edwards’ A Dictionary of Thoughts in 1909, Century Illustrated Magazine, also from 1909. And then it just keeps on keeping on.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
19. “To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake it is necessary to stand out in the cold.”

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
20. “I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self“

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
21. “The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal”

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
22. “Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim of human existence.”

I mean, this is kind of the whole aim and purpose of the Nicomachean Ethics, but this is not a quotation of a translation of it.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
“Those that know do, those that understand, teach.”

This variation on the put down “those who can, do, those who can’t, teach” does not seem to appear before the last decade or so.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
“The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend.“

So, this sounds nice, but would you really want to go against 50 people with one ally? This is motivational poster fake.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…
25. “Character is made by many acts: it may be lost by a single one“

This is a misattribution made only rather recently online from a Methodist Minister’s writings in the 1800s. It is a very Christian and rather un-Aristotelian notion.

sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/23/mem…

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More from @sentantiq

sententiae antiquae Profile picture
Jun 3
Today we are arguing about translations and translating the Odyssey!

In particular, let’s fight about the phrase…. οὐκ ἐθέλων ἐθελούσῃ (ouk ethelōn ethelousē)

Come for the grammar, stay for the comparison of translations!
This phrase is used to describe Odysseus and Calypso when Hermes first arrives on Ogygia in book 5

It can be translated as something like “[he slept alongside her] unwillingly while she was willing” and is a particular pointed phrase
But it is a little more complicated than that and also a good indication of how Greek differs from English and some other languages

Participles are really what makes ancient Greek different. Early Greek tends to have a lot of participles and they can do very different things
Read 17 tweets
sententiae antiquae Profile picture
May 27
Today we are arguing about Odysseus' name!

Odysseus vs. Ulysses
The Odyssey itself toys with the hero's name. It can be traced to the verb odussomai, which means to hate or to be hateful
Athena may allude to this in book 1 when she says to Zeus:

“…Didn’t Odysseus please you
By making sacrifices along the ships of the Argives
In broad Troy? Why are you so hateful [ôdusao] to him, Zeus?”
Read 22 tweets
sententiae antiquae Profile picture
May 25
just to sum up, 5 points on the rancor over nolan's #odyssey cast

1. Epic is myth and fantasy, not history. these are not real people, they are part of stories

2. The terms used to describe heroes within epic are ambiguous and flexible and change over time
3. The ancient audiences conceived of the heroic world as one big interconnected family, Dannaus, Aegyptus, Agenor etec knit Persians, Greeks, Egyptians, and Phoenicians into one family. Hektor and Memnon were cousins!
4. Skin color and other physical features in epic don't map onto modern concepts of race. These assumptions are truly anachronistic and have everything to do with our own preoccupations
Read 4 tweets
sententiae antiquae Profile picture
May 25
One final thread on why the gender, race, appearance of actors in the #Odyssey shouldn’t matter, and, moreover, why appearances are more complicated in this epic than any other
Athena repeatedly makes him ugly and nobler again, so much so that there’s no sense of what he truly looks like: is he the pirate man in book 8, the withered beggar in book 16, the godlike man before Telemachus in book 16, or the cleaned up beau of Penelope in book 23?
Athena repeatedly makes him ugly and nobler again, so much so that there’s no sense of what he truly looks like: is he the pirate man in book 8, the withered beggar in book 16, the godlike man before Telemachus in book 16, or the cleaned up beau of Penelope in book 23?
Read 16 tweets
sententiae antiquae Profile picture
May 11
sorry folks. Achilles and Odysseus are not role models, they are epic heroes. Each epic starts by specifying their destructiveness to their communities.

Iliad: Achilles's rage sends myriad Achaeans to their doom

Odyssey: Odysseus tried to bring his men home and failed
in fact, the entire heroic age--the events of the Theban and Trojan Wars--is aimed at ERADICATING THE RACE OF HEROES because they are too bellicose towards each other and irreverent towards the gods [see Hesiod's Works and Days and the fragmentary Cypria]
And this is not a modern reading. As early as the 6th century BCE, allegorical interpretations [i.e., those that assumed the epics contained secret or indirect meanings] were dominant alongside the understanding that the poems were complex and their protagonists flawed
Read 5 tweets
sententiae antiquae Profile picture
Dec 29, 2024
#odyssey discourse whirling around, but reading epic is not easy because it is a little weird

1. I think almost no one in antiquity ‘read’ Homeric epic from beginning to end.
They listened to episodes and then later read passages. It would have been rare to experience either epic from beginning to end
one would have gone to reading the epic from beginning to end without prior knowledge of the characters and plots, the backstories and variations2.No
Read 20 tweets

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