Sir, – Marcus Crothers Fitzgerald may well be right that truth is the victim of humanity (Letters, March 15th).
But no matter how often it is repeated in social media, nowhere in the surviving plays of the Greek dramatist Aeschylus does a character say, “In war, the first casualty is truth”, or anything like it.
In an unattributed fragment, an unknown speaker says, “In some circumstances, god respects an appropriate time for falsehood”.
There is, however, nothing to indicate that war is one of those circumstances.
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Perhaps it is in social media that truth is the first to suffer. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN McGING,
Regius Professor
of Greek Emeritus,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.