Damocles

	Email		Print
	Bookmark		Link

Damocles

Damocles (pronounced [dæm?kle?z]) is a figure featured in a single moral anecdote

Anecdote

An anecdote is a short Narrative narrating an interesting or amusing biographical incident. It may be as brief as the setting and provocation of a List of French phrases#B....
concerning the Sword of Damocles, which was a late addition to classical Greek culture. The figure belongs properly to legend

Legend

A legend is a narrative of human actions that are perceived both by teller and listeners to take place within human history and to possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude ....
rather than Greek myth

Greek mythology

Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the Ancient Greece concerning their List of Greek mythological figures#Immortals and Greek hero cult, Cosmology#Metaphysical cosmology, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices....
. The anecdote apparently figured in the lost history of Sicily

Sicily

Sicily is an Autonomous regions with special statute of Italy. Of all the regions of Italy, Sicily covers the largest land area at 25,708 km? and currently has just over five million inhabitants....
by Timaeus of Tauromenium

Timaeus (historian)

Timaeus , Ancient Greece historian, was born at Tauromenium in Sicily. Driven out of Sicily by Agathocles, he migrated to Athens, where he studied rhetoric under a pupil of Isocrates and lived for fifty years....
(c.

Discussion

Ask a question about 'Damocles'

Start a new discussion about 'Damocles'

Answer questions from other users

Full Discussion Forum

Encyclopedia

Damocles (pronounced [dæm?kle?z]) is a figure featured in a single moral anecdote

Anecdote

Legend

Greek mythology

Sicily

Timaeus (historian)

356 BC

Events...
– 260 BC). The Roman orator Cicero

Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Ancient Rome philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Constitution of the Roman Republic. Cicero is widely considered one of Rome's greatest rhetoric and prose stylists....
may have read it in Diodorus Siculus

Diodorus Siculus

Diodorus Siculus , was a Roman Greece historian who flourished in the 1st century BC. According to Diodorus' own work, he was born at Agira in Sicily ....
. He made use of it in his Tusculan Disputations, V. 61–62, by which means it passed into the European cultural mainstream.

The story

The Damocles of the anecdote was an excessively flattering courtier in the court of Dionysius II of Syracuse

Dionysius II of Syracuse

Dionysius the Younger or Dionysius II ruled Syracuse, Italy, Sicily from 367 BC to 357 BC and again from 346 BC to 344 BC.He was the son of Dionysius I of Syracuse....
, a fourth century BC tyrant

Tyrant

This article is about the political ruler. For other uses see Tyrant and Tyranny In modern usage, a tyrant is a single ruler holding absolute political power over a state or within an organization....
of Syracuse

Syracuse, Italy

Syracuse is a historic city in southern Italy, the Capital of the province of Syracuse. The city is noted for its rich Greek history, culture, amphitheatres, architecture and association to Archimedes, playing an important role in ancient times as one of the top powers of the Mediterranean world; it is over 2,700 years old....
. 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.

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. 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?"

In culture, art, and literature

The Sword of Damocles is frequently used in allusion

Allusion

An allusion is a figure of speech that makes a reference to, or representation of, a place, event, literary work, mythology, or work of art, either directly or by implication....
to this tale, epitomizing

Epitome

An epitome is a summary or miniature form; an instance that represents a larger reality, also used as a synonym for embodiment.Many documents from the Ancient Greek and Ancient Rome worlds survive now only "in epitome," referring to the practice of some later authors who wrote distilled versions of larger works now lost....
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, especially one in which the onset of tragedy is restrained only by a delicate trigger or chance. Shakespeare's Henry IV
Henry IV, Part 1

Henry IV, Part 1 is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written no later than 1597. It is the second of Shakespeare's tetralogy that deals with the successive reigns of Richard II of England, Henry IV of England , and Henry V of England....
expands on this theme: "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"; compare the Hellenistic and Roman

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC....
imagery connected with the insecurity offered by Tyche

Tyche

In Ancient Greek religion, Tyche was the presiding tutelary deity that governed the fortune and prosperity of a city, its destiny. Increasingly during the Hellenistic period, cities had their own specific iconic version of Tyche, wearing a mural crown ....
and Fortuna.

Woodcut images of the Sword of Damocles as an emblem

Emblem

An emblem is a pictorial , abstract art or representational, that epitomizes a concept ? e.g., a moral truth, or an allegory ? or that represents a person, such as a Monarch or Saint symbology....
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. In Wenceslas Hollar

Wenceslas Hollar

V?clav Hollar , known in England as Wenceslaus an in Germany as Wenzel Hollar , was a Czechs etcher. He was born in Prague, and died in London, being buried at St Margaret's church, Westminster....
'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

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes was an English philosophy, remembered today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory....
to illustrate his Philosophicall Rudiments concerning Government and Society (London 1651).

The Sword of Damocles appears frequently in popular culture

Popular culture

Popular culture is the totality of Distinction memes, ideas, Perspective s and Attitude s that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture....
including novel

Novel

File:2009 stapelweise Neuerscheinungen im Buchladen.JPGA novel is today a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern Romance and in the tradition of the novella....
s, feature film

Feature film

In the film industry, a feature film is a film made for initial Film distributor in Movie theater and being the "main attraction" of the screening ....
s, television series, videogames and even music

Popular music

Popular music is music that is accessible to the mainstream and disseminated by one or more of the mass media. It belongs to any of a number of musical genres, and stands in contrast to classical music, which historically was the music of the elite and upper strata of society, and traditional music which was disseminated orally....
.

External links

, Ackland Art Museum
Ackland Art Museum

The Ackland Art Museum is a museum and academic unit of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was founded through the bequest of William Hayes Ackland to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill....
,