The arrogance of greatness

There was a time when the Greek gods sent down Nemesis to make man humble

When blessed with fortune, a man was expected to be gracious, humble and kind. Fortune could take the form of beauty or wealth or rank or power or skill or strength. It could result in Hubris, a notion that the Greeks feared most.

Hubris means great arrogance which manifests in the humiliation and shaming of those around. In Hubris, a man loses all good sense, and assumes he is greater than the gods, a master of his own destiny. Hubris is the victory disease, the megalomania that follows when one gets what one desires. The ancient warned against Hubris in their songs and stories and plays.



Those struck with Hubris had to face the wrath of the Olympians which manifested in the form of a terrifying and remorseless goddess called Nemesis. She made the arrogant and the proud regret their ways. She humbled the supercilious and humiliated the haughty. She was visualised as being winged, sometimes blind, holding in her hand a scourge, a stick, a measurement scale, a balance and a sword.

In Homer's great epic, Iliad, one encounters Hubris repeatedly. Iliad tells the story of Illium or Troy whose prince Paris elopes with the most beautiful woman in Greece, Helen, queen of Sparta. To bring her back, her husband, Melenaus, and his brother, Agamemnon, set sail with an armada of a thousand ships.

They besiege the city of Troy, determined to avenge their humiliation and bring the Trojans to their knees. The siege which goes on for ten years is, in a way, an act of Nemesis. Troy is paying the price for its Hubris, the arrogance that its prince can get away with adultery.

In the Greek army is a warrior called Achilles. When his concubine is claimed by Agamemnon, he is so angry that he refuses to fight. Agamemnon displays Hubris when he assumes he can just get away with taking what belongs to another; as a result he faces severe defeat at the hands of the Trojans.

He is pushed back and his army faces many defeats. Achilles also displays Hubris because he arrogantly knows that without his support the Greeks cannot win.

For this he pays a price: his beloved friend (some say lover) Patrolocus is killed by the Trojans. In fury, Achilles re-enters the battlefield and challenges the great warlord Hektor, eldest of the Trojan princes, to a duel. Achilles wins but in a fit of megalomania he does something that disgusts the gods. He ties the ankles of the dead Hektor to his chariot and drags it around like a piece of rag cloth.

Hektor's entire family including his old parents witnesses the humiliation of his dead body. The king of Troy, Priam, begs Achilles to stop and finally pays Hektor's weight in gold to reclaim the body of his beloved son. For this display of overweening pride, Achilles dies before the Greeks win the Trojan war. His desire to find glory in victory is taken away from him by the gods.

In the story of Oedipus, we learn how the young man, in arrogance, kills a man who dared block his path on a bridge. He then proceeds to marry the man's widow and become master of his land. He is humbled and humiliated when he learns later in life that the man he murdered was his father and the woman he married was his mother.

He realises too late that man can be blind even when he has eyes. In shame, he blinds himself.
Narcissus falls in love with his own beauty. And so the gods decide that he will fall in love with himself and drown as he tries to kiss his own reflection on water.

When Andromeda's mother bragged that her daughter was more beautiful than the goddess Aphrodite, she ended up being chained to a rock and tormented by a monster until she was rescued by the hero Perseus.

u00a0As the Greek world made way for Christianity, ideas such as Hubris and Nemesis survived for they played a critical role in creating a noble society. Humility became a critical Christian virtue, pride, one of the seven deadly sins and Nemesis transformed from a fearsome goddess to simply a metaphor for the wrath of an angry God.

In Victorian times, Nemesis became a model for the figure of justice that came to grace the halls of many a courthouse. Artists visualised her as being blindfolded, holding a balance scale in one hand and a sword in the other, a form which is familiar to all of us even today.u00a0