“Only the dead have seen an end to war”: Misattributing to Plato in Stella Maris ?

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In my experience as a student of how violence is used by and how it affects human beings and human societies, Cormac McCarthy’s books have the force and power and pragmatically acute sensitivity to the brutality of the world and human suffering that I found when I first read the Iliad of Homer in its entirety in Greek fifty-one years ago. The Iliad is peerless, but McCarthy is among the great writers, painters, poets, songsters, and other sorts of people (photographers, filmmakers, historians, philosophers, psychologists, veterans, pursuers of peace, and masters of war) who share a passion for trying to figure out who we are and why we do what we do. Their creative talents make them near peers to Homer in helping us to see “what it is and what it is” when it comes to how and why human beings have used violence and will never stop using it and being affected by it.In December 2022, I bought The Passenger and Stella Maris and read through their pages when I had time and was in the proper frame of mind and soul to take them in. Almost every page in Stella Maris sets the reader’s mind to musing and more. On p. 71, I read Alicia’s response to the proposition put as a question: “You think that nuclear war is inevitable.” Alicia says, “I agree with Plato that only the dead have seen an end to war.”In the 2013 Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical World, I distill the results of at least a month of sporadic work over the course of a decade trying to track down the origin of the statement “Only the dead have seen an end to war.” It is hard to prove a negative, namely here that Plato nowhere wrote “only the dead have seen an end to war.” The source of its misattribution to Plato is ultimately and more than once Douglas MacArthur. And that has made it widespread.My hunt for the source of this statement (Tritle and Palaima, 2013, 734–35) included lengthy exchanges in October 2003 both with James W. Zobel, then archivist of the Douglas MacArthur Library in Norfolk, Virginia, and Neil Young, historian of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London. I also looked through the two editions of the translations of Plato that we know Douglas MacArthur had in his library and asked leading classicist Plato scholars if they could direct me to any such remark in Greek. Professor Daniel Tompkins suggested that a related Greek word like neikos or eris, both meaning essentially “strife,” might be used in Greek instead of polemos, the precise word for the concept of war per se. So, I pored over references in ancient Greek lexica and tried to imagine what other words in classical Greek could be transmogrified via translation into English into the flat declaration about war being an eternal given in human societies, as we have it ascribed to Plato.I was also contacted by the late John P. Wheeler (personal email communication August 14, 2006), who self-identified to me as having “chaired the group that built the Vietnam Wall [and] later [having] served as first chairman and CEO of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.” He wrote that the “USMA [United States Military Academy West Point] has duty [sic] to lead in public correction, since it was MacArthur’s May 12, 1962 Duty-Honor-Country speech at USMA that placed the quote and misattribution in the American lexicon.” In 2017 I even asked Mark Bowden, who wrote the account Black Hawk Down (1999) upon which Ridley Scott based his 2001 film, whether he remembered where he had come upon the quotation, which Scott famously puts on screen at the opening of his film. Bowden did not. (Ironically, however, Bowden uses a quotation from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as the epigraph for his book: “It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting the ultimate practitioner.”)The statement, widely credited to Plato, is nowhere to be found in Plato. But it is in an essay by George Santayana. In his Soliloquy #25, “Tipperary,” Santayana (1922, 100–102) tells us what he remembers as his own long and serious thoughts about war prompted by looking upon recuperating officers in an Oxford coffee house celebrating the Armistice that had just ended armed hostilities in World War I—tragically a week too late for Wilfred Owen, on November 11, 1918. And Santayana writes, out of sympathy and out of a philosophical understanding of the human condition, “Yet the poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war is over! Only the dead have seen the end of war.”I suppose that given the historical setting of Stella Maris in 1972 and given the widespread reporting of MacArthur’s most famous speech using the misattribution (on accepting the Sylvanus Thayer Award at the USMA on May 12, 1962), and finally given Alicia’s familiarity with matters military, what McCarthy has written is what Alicia would have somehow learned and at least passively known. It is what she or any other learned person would have said in 1972. Ironically, Dr. Neil Young (October 10, 2003) of the Imperial War Museum justified the public display of the statement falsely attributed to Plato and put up on the walls of the IWM in 1989 by citing the Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations, published by the United States Naval Institute in 1966. But, of course, its author, Robert Debs Heinl Jr., Colonel US Marine Corps Retired, was relying on Douglas MacArthur as his authority.The Plato quote cited in Stella Maris prompted me to look online. It is good to know that ten years after the record was set straight in the Oxford Handbook, the misattribution is being finally corrected:Yet it prevails because, if we riff on what is arguably MacArthur’s most often quoted remark (from his address to the joint session of Congress on April 19, 1951), famous remarks of old soldiers never die, nor do they fade away.