Bret Devereaux

Ok, so the tradition comes to Greece and they make statues mostly...of gods and heroes. When regular people do get statues in a Greek polis, it is explicitly because they have done something that community values and they express some value the community wants. 7/22

...is a bit of a fib. The public assumed these guys killed the tyrants - after all, we made statues of them - but they didn't, they killed his brother. As Thucydides notes, "So little pains do the commons take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first..." 9/22

"...story that comes to hand." (Thuc. 1.20). Statues have always been about commemorating values, and have never been about teaching history. The statues of the tyrannicides communicated "Athens doesn't like tyrants" not "these two fellows specifically killed tyrants." 10/22

Now, it isn't that we don't have large, publicly funded history teaching tools! We do! They're called museums (and also to an extent, battlefield parks)! But statues are not teaching tools. No history is lost when a statue comes down. 11/22

On the flip-side, that means statues aren't *about* the people they're *of.* The statues of the tyrannicides weren't about Harmodius and Aristogeiton (the two fellows in question), they were *about* the overthrow of the tyrants in Athens. 12/22

So don't expect historians to rush to defend the statues. We've been complaining about them being bad teaching tools for 2,400 years. The thing is, you don't pay historians to get misty-eyed over statues, you pay us to uncover, remember and explain uncomfortable truths. 13/22

So when we are asking "should this statue stay up or should it go away" the question is not about 'heritage' OR if the person in the statue lived a perfect, saintly life. The question is, "what values does this statue express?" 14/22