Hubris & Nemesis
Overreaching pride and the divine payback it invites — the rhythm of arrogance and retribution that drives Greek tragedy and history alike.
Hubris originally meant violent, insolent outrage that dishonors others or oversteps human limits — in Athens it was even a prosecutable offense — while Nemesis was the goddess and principle of righteous retribution that restores balance. From Homer (8th century BCE) through the tragedians and Herodotus' Histories (5th century BCE), Greek narrative returns again and again to the great brought low for presuming too much, with Xerxes bridging the Hellespont as the classic case. The pattern expressed a deep Greek conviction that the gods resent mortal excess and that arrogance carries its own downfall. The concept matters as the moral engine of Greek tragedy and a lasting Western image of pride going before a fall.
How it traveled
- IliadIos · -700explains
- OdysseyIos · -700explains
- Works and DaysAscra · -650explains
- TheogonyAscra · -650explains
- AgamemnonAthens · -458explains
- HistoriesThurii (Magna Graecia) · -425explains
- History of the Peloponnesian WarAthens · -400explains
- HistoriesMegalopolis · -118explains
- In C. VerremFormiae · -70explains
- Ab urbe conditaPadua · -27explains
- AeneidRome · -19explains
- MetamorphosesTomis (Constanța) · 8explains
- EpistulaeTomis (Constanța) · 17explains
- GeographyAmaseia · 24explains
- AlexanderChaeronea · 120explains
- Civil WarsAlexandria · 165explains
- Description of Greece— · 180explains
- DeipnosophistaeNaucratis · 230explains
- Res GestaeRome · 400explains
- Midrash Tanchuma BuberTiberias · 600
- Midrash TanchumaTiberias · 600
- Yalkut Shimoni on NachTiberias · 1250
- Yalkut Shimoni on TorahTiberias · 1250
- ZoharGuadalajara · 1280
- Reshit ChokhmahTzfat · 1575
- Likutei HalakhotBreslov (Ukraine) · 1840
- Malbim on IsaiahBucharest · 1860
- Historical LibrarySyracuse (Sicily)explains
- Historia RomanaRomeexplains
- Jewish Antiquities—explains
- Library—explains
- The Jewish War—explains
- Antiquitates RomanaeRomeexplains
- In XII Prophetas—explains
- OrationesPrusaexplains
- Scholia in Iliadem—explains
- Suidae lexicon—explains
- Ἀλεξάνδρου ἈνάβασιςNicomediaexplains
- De BellisConstantinople (Istanbul)explains
- OdesRomeexplains
Key passages(20)
These and innumerable other instances of the kind are sometimes (and would that it were always so!) the work of Adrastia, the chastiser of evil deeds and the rewarder of good actions, whom we also cal
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In XII Prophetas · Cyril of Alexandria
You see how the god smites with his thunderbolt creatures of greatness and does not suffer them to display their pride, while little ones do not move him to anger; and you see how it is always on the
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Dissertationum a Lucio digestarum reliquiae · Musonius Rufus
All this Minerva heard; and she approved their songs and their resentment; but her heart was brooding thus, “It is an easy thing to praise another, I should do as they: no creature of the earth should
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Philip’s Desperate Measures In this period a certain dreadful foreshadowing of misfortune fell upon king Philip and the whole of Macedonia, of a kind well worthy of close attention and record. As thou
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Scholia in Sophoclem (scholia vetera) · Scholia in Sophoclem
Chorus I cannot agree that you have counseled well: you would have been better dead than living and blind. Oedipus Do not tell me that things have not been best done in this way: give me counsel no mo
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