- Title
- Cleomenes of Naucratis, villain or victim?
- Creator
- Baynham, Elizabeth
- Relation
- Greece, Macedon and Persia: Studies in Social, Political and Military History in Honour of Waldemar Heckel p. 127-134
- Relation
- http://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/greece-macedon-and-persia.html
- Publisher
- Oxbow Books
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- According to that great universal reference work of the Internet, Wikipedia, a classic humorous paradigm of inductive reasoning is the so-called 'duck test'; i.e. 'If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.' This aphorism has been attributed to several individuals, but Richard Immerman notes in his book on the CIA a rather interesting and sinister instance of pernicious labelling associated with the saying in the United States during the Cold War, when fear of Communist aggression drove American foreign policy and highly placed officials who had themselves suffered from Senator McCarthy's indictments applied the same highly subjective processes and criteria for discrimination to a foreign arena. The American diplomat Richard Cunningham Patterson Jr., ambassador to Guatemala in 1950 openly boasted that he could spot a Guatemalan Communist merely by projecting his own understanding of Communism to the local context. In the case of Cleomenes of Naucratis, Ptolemy's hyparch in Egypt and Alexander's former satrap (if Stanley Burstein is right), we might substitute 'villain' for 'duck'; if Cleomenes seems to have behaved like a crook, and several of our ancient writers condemn him as such, then should we do the same? Well, we shall see.
- Subject
- Cleomenes of Naucratis; villain; Ancient History
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1316269
- Identifier
- uon:23120
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781782979234
- Language
- eng
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