Debunking Gaius Petronius Arbiter Quote

I was looking around for a quote to descibe what is happened to our college (10% cuts, redundancies, restructuring etc.) and  remembered an old quote from Petronius Arbiter, a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero, which I first saw on our notice board in the sociology department at Newcastle Poly 20 years ago.

We trained hard . . . but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

I've since seen this quote in various places over the years. How amazing that something written 2200 years ago can have such resonance for us today. In fact it's a little TOO amazing, and a quick search on Google reveals it to be a fake, though it appears on hundreds of websites, quoted as being for real. Most quote it as being written in 210 BC, which would have been tricky for ol' Petronius because he wasn't born for another 237 years! (ca. 27–66 AD)

Who started it? Nobody is sure but this website  http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/petronius.html has some ideas:

 The following appears on page 162 of Robert Townsend's Up the Organization (New York: Knopf, 1970):

I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

Townsend cites ``Petronius Arbiter (circa A.D. 60).'' Another quote from Townsend (page 7):

``And God created the Organization and gave it dominion over man.''

... Genesis 1, 30A, Subparagraph VIII

which tells us how reliable Townsend is.

Is Townsend the sought-for perpetrator? Many think so, but it seems more likely he is simply an early continuator into print of a long-standing bulletin-board joke. Many correspondents, most notably Richard Dengrove, have told me about a note by J. P. Sullivan in the May 1981 Petronian Society Newsletter (12(1), p.1) addressing this important question. Quoting (without permission):

... let me give my tentative account, which I hope other readers can correct, of its provenance. Some disgruntled soldier of a literary bent, whether commissioned or noncommissioned I do not know, pinned this ``quotation'' to a bulletin board in one of the camps of the armies occupying Germany sometime after 1945 (the style suggests a British occupying force). Since the sentiment is impeccable, whether applied to military, governmental, or academic administration, it has enjoyed a cachet borrowed from Petronius ever since.

(To which I might add, sometimes I think it applies to administration in the business world, too.)

(Thanks to the STUMPERS list for the Townsend reference, and to Dengrove and others for the Sullivan one.)

I like this guy's style:

Comments from our readers

Many people send in email letters, asking similar questions:

1. Why do I think the quote is a fake?
2. Was there really such a person as Petronius Arbiter?
3. Don't I agree that even if the quote is a fake the sentiment it expresses is so true that it ought not be a fake?

My answers would be (if I bothered to reply to the masses of email I receive on this topic):

1. Why do you think it is genuine? Because you read it somewhere on some computer?
2. Yes. Look him up in the encyclopedia.
3. After a while it becomes a bit tedious.

(The answers I should give, if I wanted to be a responsible netizen -- or should I say webster? -- are:

1. I've read all the surviving works of Petronius, and the quote just ain't there.
2. Yes, he was a courtier of the emperor Nero's. His famous book, the Satyricon was the basis of a Fellini movie. Its structure is loosely modelled on Homer's episodic epic, the Odyssey. In Homer's work, every time the hero is about to reach home, the god Poseidon (because of a previous insult) thwarts him with a storm. In Petronius's, every time the hero is about to have sex, the god Priapus (because of a previous insult) thwarts him with impotence.
3. Such wry sentiments are commonplaces in the ``how to conduct yourself in business'' genre of writing, a debased modern branch of the ever-popular ``conduct literature.'' If mankind lost the Petronius quote we could repair the damage by clipping out Dilbert cartoons.

Don't tell anybody.)

 

   Again from:   http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/petronius.html 

 Nicely put!

As he himself says, however, don't trust something just because you see it on a computer screen. The site lists erroneous uses of the quote, and includes:

Baroness Thomas of Walliswood (speaking in the [British] House of Lords, 18 Feb 1997, as reported in Hansards in column 82 for that day).

But a check of the Hansard records for that day reveals no such reference. The plot thickens! However, further check confirms the reference is correct but the date is a mistake. For the full text see here: 

 Obviously a typo. She said it on the 10th.. .. .Lords Hansard (10 Feb 1997) . .Lords Hansard text for 10 Feb 1997 (170210-10). .Education Bill. .. .10 Feb 1997 : Column 82. .. .from all social backgrounds and levels of income come together simply because they live in the same area. I admit that may not be the case in the more difficult and dangerous parts of our inner cities. However, that is no reason to set about destroying those schools in the many parts of this country where they achieve exactly the purpose I have referred to. . .Who takes the decisions about changes in schools? It is interesting that Mark Carlisle, Secretary of State for Education, said in 1979: . .. ."It is our belief that local education authorities and local people--not central Government--are best placed to determine the most suitable form of secondary school organisation in their area".--[Official Report, Commons, 19/6/79; cols. 1120 to 21.] . .That was quoted in the House of Commons briefing on this Bill. I do not think that any noble Lords on this side of the Chamber would quarrel with that. When choice over change is given to parents whose children are currently at a given school, the alteration in school characteristic becomes most dangerous. The noble Lord, Lord Monkswell, made that point neatly. I shall not emphasise it further. . .. .Some interesting remarks were made--there were not as many as I had hoped for--about the general nature of education. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon raised the point. The noble Earl, Lord Baldwin of Bewdley, mourned the decline of community schools and referred to their value as educational institutions. On the whole, perhaps noble Lords felt defeated by the detail of the Bill, finding it difficult to relate that to the broad requirements of education. The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, was an exception. . .. .I turn to the clauses which caused the most argument--and most amusing and knockabout argument it was, too. My noble friend Lord Tope expressed fluently our views on the principles of selection. I do not need to repeat them. I am not sure that I join with the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Castle Morris, on the salmonella part of the curate's egg. The noble Lord expressed himself with his usual panache and fluency. No doubt the points will be made again by the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington of Ribbleton. . .. .However, we had a spirited argument about comprehensive versus selective schools. Many noble Lords who defended the Bill in this argument defeated their own objective. They referred to the fact that the situation was not good when we had grammar schools; we then changed the organisation and it was still not very good; so we propose to change the organisation again. No doubt many noble Lords are familiar with the well known words written by Petronius more than 2000 years ago about reorganisation. He said that reorganisation can be a wonderful method for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation. That is the argument which many hold against the series of Bills since 1979 which have sought to change our educational process. We are not sure whether there were 21, 19 or 18, but there have been too many.

 

Orac 13th March 2002, 02:34

 

http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-39372.html 

Comments

[Darryl]

There appears to be another source for this quotation: Charlton Ogburn, from a Harper's Magazine article from January 1957 titled "Merrill's Marauders: The truth about an incredible adventure". Information from the wikiquote dot org website led me to this finding. Whether or not the use of this is original may be debated, but it is a published, known and verifiable, and not otherwise attributed use of the passage.

[Iain]

Hi Darryl, thanks for that. A useful addition to the debate! Interesting: in revisiting the quote now, I'm amazed how many people still attribute it to Petronius despite all the evidence to the contrary.

[Carmen27Mills]

I opine that to receive the personal loans from banks you ought to present a good reason. But, one time I've received a bank loan, because I was willing to buy a bike.

[Iain]

You were willing to buy a bike? You wild crazy creature you!

[Arrne]

Why in fact it's a little TOO amazing?

Do you really think organisations have changed that much?

[James]

maybe it doesn't matter where these words/quote comes from...but my experience in my working life is that they are true and very true as of 11 September 2012 in my job.
I am working on a project internally for HR and yesterday the fan was covered and my boss changed the way things would be achieved three times during the day. I was as angry as all hell and in the evening I worked out that I don't mind if the things/ways get changed [the goal posts are moved], but it is that it is from a knee jerk all the time and thus the people doing the processing are subject to some one elses lack of organisation and their grand EGO; despite them having a university education.
So "We trained hard . . . but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization." is probably a very old way of thinking and hence our attributing it someone who died a long time ago.

I am always amazed at how these words sum up a lot of businesses in this modern age and thus have kept a copy all these years after finding them and even posting this on a web site that I have never read before...I think that some re capitualation is fine... but we seem to do it on such a grand scale.

It is the 'demoralisation' that is the bad bit really.

[Iain]

I know what you mean James. I work in a further education college, and I'm staggered, on an almost daily basis, by the way management and government are constantly changing things, very rarely for the better, and very often for the worst. Why does it have to be this way??

[Jim KABLE]

I first came across the quote in a Letters-to-the-Editor column of the Sydney Morning Herald in the early 1980s when I was working in an educational program support office - where in essence reorganisation and demoralisation were the order of the day - and continued so in other layers of the NSW education department - which has been through at least three other name changes since - though I had nearly 20 years beyond that time in Japan - where, guess what - if not quite as bad - reorganisation was on the rise - and pm after pm declares an interest in reorganising the education system - even here too in Australia - the current pm searches for the Holy Grail of reorganisation and "excellence" in .... no, not the UK.... in ....New York! Who'd have thought! I have my own heroes of educational equity and brilliance within the various jurisdictions of NY, NY - but overall I think there is little one can transplant from there to IMPROVE here! The answers always lie within our ourselves, within our own domains - even if triggers might lie elsewhere!

[Jim KABLE]

It was attributed in that Sydney Morning Herald 30+ years ago - to Petronius. I am now inclined to attribute it to Charlton OGBURN - the provenance far more trustworthy!