JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

© 2006

Anything You Quote May Be Used Against You: Supposedly Sophoclean Police Wanted Posters

“He escapes who is not pursued.”—Sophocles.

Such is the motto presented in big red letters at the bottom of Massachusetts State Police wanted posters. And not only there: it has become a popular slogan among fugitive investigation units and bounty hunters, including the National Association of Fugitive Investigators (NAFI).

Needless to say, I was surprised to find cops quoting an ancient Greek tragedian. My next surprise was not finding the line anywhere in Sophocles’ surviving works, or anyone else’s, for that matter.

There is a similar line in Sophocles’ masterpiece “Oedipus Tyrannos” (better known under the imprecise Latin title “Oedipus Rex”), which suggests an even stranger situation: cops not merely employing a Sophoclean line, but mistranslating and/or adapting it.

And, I must add, misunderstanding it. If “Oedipus Tyrannos” is indeed the source of the line, then its use by criminal-hunters is ironic in the most Greek-tragedic sense of the term.

Understood in its own context as a semi-original, special-use motto, it’s actually a pretty good quote. Granted, your first reaction to it might be, “Duh!” It can read like a pompous way of stating the obvious. But most fugitives are people who simply didn’t show up to court; they can “escape” justice passively by doing almost nothing, unless someone actively tracks them down. The quote has strength, perhaps even some regality, within its own industry.

Its use appears to be relatively recent and regional, virtually exclusive to the East Coast and particularly centered in the Northeast. I may have caught a neologism (or neo-paraphrase) in its early stages of propagation here; it will be interesting to see if it makes it long-term in the etymological Darwinism struggle of survival of the most fitting.

The earliest use of the quote I could find was as a motto on the December 1999 “Activity Bulletin” of the Fort Lauderdale (Florida) Police Department’s Investigations Bureau, where it appeared in the comma-marked form, “He escapes, who is not pursued.”¹ It was attributed to Sophocles. The context was an article on fugitive-hunting. The police department didn’t respond to my questions about the use and origin of the quote.

That usage appears more idiosyncratic than seminal. While I can’t say who started using the quote, New England is certainly the home of the most high-profile and influential sources. Perhaps our famed academic institutions, or at least our bookstores, have something to do with that.

One key figure might be Lt. Kevin Horton of the Massachusetts State Police, who is also a board member of NAFI, which, like the State Police, is based in Framingham, Massachusetts. Horton didn’t return my phone call. But it seems like more than coincidence that the State Police and NAFI both prominently use the quote.²

NAFI’s Web site uses it without quote marks and without attribution to Sophocles.³ NAFI holds national conventions—most recently in Chicago—that surely spread the quote.

Another crucial source is the fortuitously named Lance Allen Wilkinson, aka “L.A.W.,” a New Hampshire bounty hunter. Until last week, when I told him the quote isn’t really accurate and he changed it, Wilkinson used the quote prominently as the motto of his Recoveries by L.A.W. bail enforcement agency. Usually, he added a three-dot ellipsis to the end of the quote, along with an attribution to Sophocles.

Wilkinson also has published an apparently well-known bounty hunter training manual and set up a training academy that is now on hiatus. His standing in the industry makes him a likely propagator of the quote. Also, he used the quote as a signature on posts in many Web forums dating back to 2003. And it’s worth noting that Wilkinson is poetically-minded, reportedly having once survived homelessness by writing poetry for passing tourists and still penning the occasional rhyme today.⁴

Wilkinson’s usage was even paid tribute in a 2004 Boston Herald profile.⁵ “He can quote the ancient Greeks and curse like a South Boston dockworker,” marveled the article about Wilkinson. “His corporate motto: ‘He escapes who is not pursued.’ It comes from Sophocles, naturally.”

“I’m sorry but I have no clue where I got the translation,” Wilkinson said when I asked him about the quote. “I’ve used it for years.”

He immediately changed the motto on his Web site to a more accurate, and far less effective, version of the “Oedipus Tyrannos” line I had mentioned in my e-mail as one example.

Other uses of the quote appear derivative, and are few enough to be cited in full.⁶

The classically named Diogenes LLC, a Connecticut private investigation firm, lists the quote, without attribution to Sophocles, as one of its “Investigative Axioms.”⁷ Diogenes’ Bradford Cole didn’t know where they got it but told me he has “heard and seen it attributed to Sophocles as well.”

The Sheriff’s Office of Clayton County, Georgia, uses the quote, with attribution to Sophocles, as a motto on its “Most Wanted” page.⁸ A MySpace user in Wisconsin known as “triggermike07” uses the quote without attribution; his page indicates law enforcement interests.⁹

The quote was used as a signature in 2005 posts to a “loss prevention” (i.e., anti-shoplifting) forum by someone known as “Troopah!” (i.e., “[State Police] Trooper” as said with a Boston-area accent).¹⁰ That user attributed the quote to Socrates in what must be a case of mishearing the original attribution. (I could not find the line in classical quotes attributed to Socrates, whose own writings do not survive, and who famously declined to escape justice even when given a golden opportunity.¹¹) The user was identified as a “Loss Prevention Agent/Student.”

The quote appears without attribution as a kind of motto on a bizarre Web site at www.blackbadge.com that appears to fall somewhere between conspiracy theory and scam. It’s registered to a resident of Howard Beach, New York.

And the quote appeared earlier this year as the signature of a Connecticut poster to a forum for the video game “World of Warcraft,” attributed to “Sophacles.”¹²

I’m not the first (though I may be the second) to wonder about the specific play that originated this supposed quote. In a 2004 post to a classics mailing list at Ohio State University’s Department of Greek and Latin, David Meadows of the Rogue Classicism blog noted the use of the quote by NAFI and asked about its origin.¹³

In response, John Peradotto, professor emeritus of classics at the State University of New York at Buffalo, suggested it is a line in “Oedipus Tyrannos” numbered as 111 in most editions. In the original (Romanized) Greek, it reads: “…ekpheu/gei de\ ta)melou/menon.” In one standard English translation, David Grene’s, that reads, “…the unheeded thing escapes.” And Peradotto is likely right; it’s Sophocles’ best-known work and his only line that comes anywhere close to the police quote.

It’s a line spoken by Creon to Oedipus as they discuss the mysterious murder of Laius, Oedipus’ predecessor as tyrant. Here’s Grene’s version of the full context of the line, as Oedipus and Creon discuss the vanished murderer or murderers:

Oedipus

Where are they in the world? Where would a trace

of this old crime be found? It would be hard

to guess where.

Creon

The clue is in this land;

that which is sought is found;

the unheeded thing escapes;

so said the God.¹⁴ [The advice comes from Apollo.]

There are, of course, lots of ways to translate the line. But in reviewing nearly a score of versions, standard and not, I never found it rendered as, “He escapes who is not pursued.”

Indeed, the original Greek is neuter, referring to a thing, not a “he,” as Peradotto and Prof. Seth Schein of the University of California, Davis’ comparative literature department told me. They both called the police version a mistranslation. That was already fairly obvious to me, not because I know Greek, but because the context is clear; Creon/Apollo is talking generally about guilt and introspection for a very specific dramatic reason, as anyone familiar with the big twist ending of “Oedipus Tyrannos” knows.

That being said, I did find one idiosyncratic translation that used “he.” Jascha Kessler’s 1999 version renders the line as, “Seek him; find him; catch him. Or he’ll escape.”¹⁵ Journalistic and plain-English to a grade-school extreme, this can only be described as an extremely loose translation and would appear to have no effect on the King James-y tone of the police version.

Some other translations employ the words “escape” or “pursue,” but there is nothing really similar to the phrasing of the police version. My review of translations was not exhaustive (and likely never could be), but I hit the versions most likely to influence a wide group of readers from at least 1900 to the present.¹⁶ (And perhaps significantly in this case, those available on Boston library and bookstore shelves.¹⁷)

The low number of sources using the police version, coupled with their extreme regional and industrial focus, suggests to me that the quote is based on one person’s idiosyncratic mistake. I’m guessing that someone in the fugitive-hunting business came across the “Oedipus” line, either in context or in some quote book, and adapted it intentionally or otherwise to suit their profession. (Of course, it is also possible, if far less likely, that the original user came across some odd translation I did not, or knew a person who made such a translation, or even made such a translation themselves.)

The irony is that nothing about “Oedipus Tyrannos” suits the fugitive-hunting profession—at least, not in the way police and bounty hunters would prefer. The whole point of the play is that Detective Oedipus, unknowingly, is the criminal he seeks. He’s actually the one who murdered Laius, thinking he was just some jerk he met along the road. And Oedipus has then unwittingly married his own mother and brought a plague down upon the land to boot.

The line in question alludes to this cleverly. Apollo certainly knows who the criminal is—and that he has not only not escaped, but is sitting on the throne. The line sounds like it demands some sort of Sherlock Holmes-ing or cross-country chase; what it actually implies is introspection and self-knowledge of the darkness within us all. That’s why it refers to an “it”—guilt or wisdom—not a “he.”¹⁸

As we currently live under our own Oedipal tyrant, such references seem almost distasteful. We surely share the guilt of some of our greatest recent fugitives, as a president sent troops to track down a leader of Iraq whom his own father relentlessly provided with chemical weapons matériel; and as an entire nation hopes to track down the terrorist mastermind we trained and unleashed on the Soviets years before.

More locally, it’s truly grotesque to see an “Oedipus” reference on the Massachusetts State Police wanted poster for James “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster whose 12 years-and-running on the lam were made possible by tip-offs from his corrupt buddies in the FBI, and in one case possibly perpetuated by a phone-tapping alert provided to Bulger’s brother by a retired State Police lieutenant.¹⁹ Indeed, there have long been questions as to whether Whitey is being pursued at all.

A country with the hubris to pretend crime occurs with no influence from “normal” society still has much to learn from “Oedipus Tyrannos,” as does whoever misquoted it.²⁰

On the bright side, I think fugitive-hunters can find other Sophoclean quotes still to their tastes and yet more in line with their realities.²¹

How about, “If you have acted dreadfully, you must suffer dreadfully”? Or, “Fortune does not fight on the side of those who take no action”?

Sophocles offers a little something for my trade as well: “In any question the truth has always the greatest strength.”

¹ At http://info.ci.Ftlaud.fl.us/police/cid1299.html. Since the publication of this column, I received an anecdotal report of an even earlier appearance of the phrase from Bill Cox, a former Louisiana State Police detective from 1976 to 1993. Cox said the phrase, with attribution to Sophocles, used to appear on out-of-state fugitive wanted flyers, copies of which were sent to the Louisiana State Police. Cox could not recall precisely when he first saw these flyers, but estimated it was in the mid-1980s, and recalled that they may have come from the New Jersey or Pennsylvania State Police. Wanted flyers currently on both agencies’ Web sites do not have the phrase. If true, Cox’s report would be still more evidence of the phrase originating in the Northeast and spreading into the South, an issue I explore later in the column. (Source: Bill Cox, personal e-mails, Jan. 19 and 25, 2010.)

2 Horton was using the quote as early as 2000, as shown in testimony he submitted to a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on fugitives, to which he appended the quote, complete with attribution to Sophocles. (Source: “Fugitives: The Chronic Threat to Safety, Law, And Order: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice Oversight of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, One Hundred Sixth Congress, Second Session, June 22, 2000,” 2001, U.S. Government Printing Office, via Google Books.)

³ At www.nafi-fugitive.com.

⁴ As described in his autobiographical note at www.beagent.com/author.htm.

⁵ “Dying Breed Lives To Chase; Bounty Hunters Thrive On Adrenaline” by John Strahinich, Boston Herald, Nov. 14, 2004, via www.lexisnexis.com.

⁶ All were found via Google or Yahoo! searches.

⁷ At www.diogenesllc.com.

⁸ At www.claytonsheriff.com/wanted/wanted.htm.

⁹ At http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=34249573.

¹⁰ At www.lpinformation.com.

¹¹ I also searched standard quotation references and found nothing similar. The closest phrasing, but with opposite literal meaning, is the King James version of Proverbs 28:1: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth….”

Update: Perhaps I went too far in saying this Biblical phrase has “opposite literal meaning.” Since the publication of this column, a friend alerted me to an allusion to this phrase in Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel “A Scanner Darkly” that actually employed it in a highly Oedipal context: “The guilty, he reflected as he drove amid the heavy late-afternoon traffic as carefully as possible, may flee when no one pursues—he had heard that, and maybe that was true.” The novel is about a drug addict and an anti-drug cop who are in fact the same person, the personalities unknown to each other due to the effects of a special drug. The “he” in this quote is the druggie/cop. The paragraph continues: “What for a certainty was true, however, was that the guilty fled, fled like hell and took plenty of swift precautions, when someone did pursue: someone real and expert and at the same time hidden. And very close by.” Dick likens his novel to ancient Greek drama in an author’s note at the end, though he refers to Nemesis, not Oedipus. I discuss the irony of police usage of this phrase later in the column.

¹² A February 2006 post at http://wow.allakhazam.com.

¹³ At http://omega.cohums.ohio-state.edu/mailing_lists/CLA-L/2004/05/0645.php.

¹⁴ From “Sophocles I,” David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds.

¹⁵ Published in “Sophocles, 2: King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone,” David R. Slavitt and Palmer Bovie, eds.

¹⁶ Here is a list of the translators and their renderings of the line, not including those given above:

Theodore Howard Banks: “…only what is neglected ever escapes.”

Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay: “Pursue a thing and you may catch it; ignored, it slips away.”

Luci Berkowitz and Theodore F. Brunner: “…what we do not seek cannot be found.”

Lewis Campbell: “…things uncared for glide away.”

Robert Fagles: “…whatever is neglected slips away.”

Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald: “If we make enquiry/We may touch things that otherwise escape us.”

Harvard Classics version (no translator cited): “…those who seek/Shall find; unsought, we lose it utterly.”

Ian Johnston: “…what is overlooked escapes.”

H.D.F. Kitto: “A man who hunts with care may often find what other men will miss.”

Bernard Knox: “What is neglected escapes.”

Hugh Lloyd-Jones: “…what one neglects escapes.”

Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff: “…what is ignored escapes.”

Paul Roche: “Only that escapes which never was pursued.”

Nicholas Rudall: “We must search and be aware of everything.”

F. Storr: “…who seeks shall find; Who sits with folded hands or sleeps is blind.”

E.F. Watling: “Unsought goes undetected.”

George Young: “What is unheeded scapes us.”

In addition, William Butler Yeats’ translation/adaptation of the play omits the line entirely. Schein suggested, “…the thing neglected escapes.”

¹⁷ Incidentally, the Boston Public Library follows the Dewey system in classifying the works of Sophocles as non-fiction! Yes, the Boston library system endorses the reality of living sphinxes.

¹⁸ Dick’s above-described use of a similar and much more familiar Biblical phrase in the context of an Oedipal story self-described as partly inspired by Greek drama raises a possibility: somehow the Bible quote got conflated with the Sophocles quote and inspired the formulation of the police phrase. The Bible quote uses the male-gender term “man,” which could emphasize reading “he” into the Sophocles quote. As a hypothesis, this idea is admittedly pretty useless, requiring one to imagine an even more elaborate origin scenario. But it just might be true. To be really wild, Dick could be the origin of such a conflation. For example, a police officer might have attended a course in which a professor taught Dick’s novel, highlighting its allusions to both Greek drama and the Bible.

¹⁹ “New England mob probe: Ex-police officer sentenced” by Theo Emery, Associated Press, via Portsmouth (New Hampshire) Herald, June 26, 2003. One thinks inevitably of Dick again.

²⁰ An amusing prank would involve creating State Police wanted posters of Oedipus. Indeed, I once referenced the crimes of Oedipus on a fake wanted poster I created for other purposes; it now occurs to me that perhaps I created the first truly Sophoclean wanted poster.

²¹ All of the following Sophocles quotes are from “Sophocles Vol. III: Fragments,” Hugh Lloyd-Jones, trans. Incidentally, here’s another fun tale referred to in Sophocles’ fragmentary “The Men of Camicus”: King Midos went around with a spiral-shaped seashell, challenging anyone to somehow work a thread through its volutes as if through the eye of a needle. King Cocalus got the better of Midos by drilling a small hole in the shell, tying thread to an ant, and then having the tiny creature crawl inside and through the winding internal passages. “Threading the shell” perhaps deserves a place in our phrasebooks.

Significant sources not cited in the text or footnotes include: http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/oedipus.html (Storr translation); http://ia.300219.us.archive.org/2/items/collectedplaysof001253mbp/collectedplaysof001253mbp_djvu.txt (Yeats translation); Prof. Robin Mitchell-Boyask, chair of Department of Greek, Hebrew and Roman Classics, Temple University, via e-mail; the Web forums of www.Gothamist.com, www.NHInsider.com and www.PoliceMag.com; www.bartleby.com/8/5/1.html (Harvard Classics translation); www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/sophocles/oedipustheking.htm (Johnstone translation); http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=eopsterminal&L=4&L0=Home&L1=Law+Enforcement+%26+Criminal+Justice&L2=Law+Enforcement&L3=Missing+%26+Wanted&sid=Eeops&b=terminalcontent&f=msp_wanted_msp_most_wanted&csid=Eeops (Massachusetts State Police wanted posters); www.sakoman.net/pg.html/14484.htm (Campbell translation). Posted Dec. 24, 2006. Updated Dec. 28, 2006; May 17, 2007; and Jan. 24 and 25, 2010.

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