主题：【原创】帕潘德里欧玩浑水摸鱼之希腊公投 -- 清湖渔夫

When I first read the extract from Tyler's work, I thought it sounded strangely contemporary. He had listed the stages in a tightly written format, rather like a direct-mail advertisement. All that was missing was a bold-faced bullet at the beginning of each line. It just did not "smell" right to me. But I ignored the scent. At the same time, I did not forward a copy to anyone on my various mailing lists.

A few months later, I received another variation. Yet this time, the quotation was attributed to Alexander Tytler. Was this extra t a typographical error?

At some point, I decided to do a quick Google research job on Tyler-Tytler and his book on Athens, which I had never heard of in my graduate school days or subsequently.

A Google-based search for me begins with a name, a phrase, and the key word: "hoax." The juicier the quotation, the sooner I run the search. Usually, the item is a hoax.

Second, I look for a link to an article on Snopes: www.snopes.com. This site specializes in email hoaxes. Sure enough, I found a version of Tyler's stage theory of democracy. I have reprinted it above.

Yes, there was a Scottish historian named Alexander Fraser Tytler. He wrote several books in the early nineteenth century, but none with the title, The Fall of the Athenian Republic. In none of his books does this stage theory passage appear.

Another site traces this quotation and finds numerous variations. It concludes that no one has identified the source.

A detailed response from the library of the University of Edinburgh reveals that no such quotation appears in the library's holdings of books by Tytler.

Edinburgh University Library occasionally receives enquiries, particularly from North America, about this particular work. However, this title is not in our Library holdings, nor does it appear in the stocks of the other major research libraries in the UK (according to the 'union' catalogue COPAC)...

Locally, the chapters of Tytler's General history ... (which we DO have) has been checked on the off-chance that The decline and fall might have been a chapter title... but it is not...

The librarian, being a librarian, covers his backside when he writes this:

Often in the enquiries we receive we are provided with a 'quote' (see below) from Tytler referring to the steps that a democracy can go thro' prior to its fall but this is not in the General history... either.

We have scanned our holdings pretty thoroughly on different occasions, going back a few years now, but we have not found the quotation or anything similar to it, but we cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that we have missed it.

He goes on to say that the U.S. Library of Congress has found no such quotation in its collection of books by Tytler.