Damocles
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Damocles (pronounced ['dæməkli:z]) is a figure featured in a single moral anecdote concerning the Sword of Damocles,[1] which was a late addition to classical Greek culture. The figure belongs properly to legend rather than Greek myth.[2] The anecdote apparently figured in the lost history of Sicily by Timaeus of Tauromenium (c. 356 – 260 BC). The Roman orator Cicero may have read it in Diodorus Siculus. He made use of it in his Tusculan Disputations, V. 61–62,[3] by which means it passed into the European cultural mainstream.
Contents |
[edit] The story
The Damocles of the anecdote was an obsequious courtier in the court of Dionysius II of Syracuse, a fourth century BC tyrant of Syracuse. Damocles exclaimed that, as a great man of power and authority, Dionysius was truly fortunate. Dionysius offered to switch places with him for a day, so he could taste first hand that fortune. In the evening a banquet was held where Damocles very much enjoyed being waited upon like a king. Only at the end of the meal did he look up and notice a sharpened sword hanging directly above his head by a single horse-hair. Immediately, he lost all taste for the fine foods and beautiful boys and asked leave of the tyrant, saying he no longer wanted to be so fortunate.[1][4]
Dionysius had successfully conveyed a sense of the constant fear in which the great man lives. Cicero uses this story as the last in a series of contrasting examples for reaching the conclusion he had been moving towards in this fifth Disputation, in which the theme is that virtue is sufficient for living a happy life.[5] Cicero asks
"Does not Dionysius seem to have made it sufficiently clear that there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms?"[6]
[edit] In culture, art, and literature
The Sword of Damocles is frequently used in allusion to this tale, epitomizing the imminent and ever-present peril faced by those in positions of power. More generally, it is used to denote the sense of foreboding engendered by a precarious situation,[7] especially one in which the onset of tragedy is restrained only by a delicate trigger or chance. Shakespeare's Henry IV expands on this theme: "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown";[8] compare the Hellenistic and Roman imagery connected with the insecurity offered by Tyche and Fortuna.
Woodcut images of the Sword of Damocles as an emblem appear in sixteenth and seventeenth-century European books of devices, with moralizing couplets or quatrains, with the import METVS EST PLENA TYRANNIS, "The tyrant is filled with fear" — as it is the tyrant's place to sit daily under the sword.[9] In Wenceslas Hollar's Emblemata Nova (London, no date), a small vignette shows Damocles under a canopy of state, at the festive table, with Dionysius seated nearby; the etching, with its clear political moral, was later used by Thomas Hobbes to illustrate his Philosophicall Rudiments concerning Government and Society (London 1651).[10]
The Sword of Damocles appears frequently in popular culture including novels, feature films, television series, videogames and music.[11]
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b "The sword of Damocles". Articles on Ancient History. http://www.livius.org/sh-si/sicily/sicily_t11.html. Retrieved on 2008-01-26.
- ^ It belongs to legend in that is an anecdote allegedly of actual persons, taking place in a specific time and place. It is not myth because it bears no relation to cultus, justifies no ritual and explains nothing beyond its immediate didactic purpose.
- ^ Tusculan Disputations: Cicero on the sword of Damocles (in English).
- ^ "(painting) The Sword of Damocles". Ackland Art Museum. http://www.ackland.org/tours/westall.html.
- ^ "virtutem ad beate vivendum se ipse esse contentam" (5.1); Mary Jaeger, "Cicero and Archimedes' Tomb" The Journal of Roman Studies 92 (2002:49-61) discusses the Damocles anecdote p 51f.
- ^ Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.1.
- ^ "Evil foreboded or dreaded," was the succinct remark of William Rose Benet, in The Reader's Encyclopedia, 1948, s.v. "Damocles".
- ^ Shakespeare, Henry IV. Part II (1597): on-line quotation in context).
- ^ Some examples on the Internet: Guillaume La Perrière, Morosophie (1553), emblem 30; Claude Paradin, Devises heroïques (1557), "Coelitus impendet" ("It hangs from Heaven"); Jean Jacques Boissard, Emblematum Liber (1593), emblem 45.
- ^ Richard Pennington, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar, 1607-1677, (Cambridge University Press) 1982: cat, no. 450.
- ^ For example: Literature - Wodehouse's Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1963), Too Loud A Solitude (1990); Film - The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Escape from L.A. (1996); TV series - The Simpsons (1991; "Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk", S3E11), The Office (2001; "Work Experience", S1E2), Reno 911! (2008; "Jumping the Shark", S5E1); Videogames - Damocles (1990), Tomb Raider (1996); Music - Sword of Damocles Externally by Lou Reed (1992), Oh My Lord by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (2001).
