term
Hubris is a literary term meaning “overweening pride.” It was originally used to describe a theatrical or literary device employed in classical tragic drama but is more often used now to describe people who exhibit too much pride, to their own and others’ detriment.
The word was introduced by the Greek philosopher and scholar aristotle in his work of literary criticism, the Poetics, of which only fragments remain. Aristotle defined the term hamartia as a tragic flaw or error in judgment that leads to a hero’s inevitable downfall. Hubris is a type of hamartia: excessive insolence, overconfidence or arrogance that causes a great (or, at least, honorable) man to disregard the warnings of the gods, ignore the established moral order, or violate the heroic code. Examples of hubris can be seen in the writings of the epic poet homer, the Histories of herodotus, and the tragedies of sophocles and euripides.
Homer’s masterpiece, the Iliad, recounts events that take place over a few days’ period toward the end of the war between Troy and Greece. Achilles, Greeks’ greatest warrior, has received a young woman, Briseis, as a sort of war trophy. The commander in chief of the Greeks, Agamemnon, has been compelled to appease the gods by surrendering his own mistress and so seizes Briseis to take her place. Achilles wages a monumental tantrum, withdraws from combat, and prays to his mother, who has influence with the gods, to cause the Greeks to be defeated in the next battles. Agamemnon tries to make amends, but Achilles continues to pout. As a result of his hubris, Achilles’ comrades are massacred, including his best friend, whose death rouses Achilles to revenge. In brutally executing his friend’s killer, however, Achilles precipitates his own demise; for it has been preordained that his death would soon follow that of the man he has slain. Achilles’ hubris hastens his own death.
Herodotus, considered the world’s first historian, wrote an exhaustive account of the great wars between the Persian Empire and Greece. Persia was a colossal force, while Greece was just a fledgling group of city-states, poorly organized and barely united. But the Greeks prevailed, Herodotus suggests, because of Persia’s hubris. The invading empire’s arrogance lay in the belief that it was appropriate for the mighty to enslave and tyrannize the weak and in its attempts to achieve victory in battle by dominating and defying nature (diverting a river’s natural flow, for example). These actions brought divine retribution, and so the Persian Empire was defeated. The tragedian aeschylus dramatizes a corresponding point of view in The Persians (472 b.c.).
In Oedipus Rex, sophocles tells of the Theban king and queen Laius and Jocasta, who learn from a prophesy that their son will murder his father and marry his mother. When Jocasta bears a son, the couple casts him out to be exposed to the elements, but unbeknownst to them, he survives. Later, when Laius is traveling on a sacred mission, he is killed on the road by bandits. Oedipus then arrives in Thebes and saves the city from the monstrous Sphinx with his cleverness. As a reward, he is pronounced king and marries the widow Jocasta. But a terrible plague descends on Thebes, and when a prophet presages blindness and ruin for Oedipus, the king dismisses him. Oedipus’s exceeding confidence in his own cunning and omniscience has tragic consequences. When they discover the truth—Oedipus was, of course, Laius’s murderer and he has indeed married his mother— Jocasta commits suicide and Oedipus blinds himself with her brooches and condemns himself to exile. Laius and Jocasta, too, have been punished for their own arrogant conviction that they could defy an oracle from the gods.
The Bacchae, Euripides’ master work, has as its main characters Dionysis, a novice god who represents primal forces, and Pentheus, who is the young ruler of Thebes. With the reckless self-assurance of youth, Pentheus refuses to recognize Dionysis as a god and treats him with bald-faced contempt. Pentheus’s hubris leads him to reject both religion and nature. As a consequence, he is killed by his own mother, who has been hypnotized by Dionysis.
Greek myths, as documented by ovid, hesiod, and others, also feature examples of hubris. Among the most memorable is the tale of Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods to give it to humans. He is punished by being shackled to a cliff and ultimately cast into the underworld.
Works Exemplifying Hubris
Euripides. Euripides V. Translated by Emily Townsend, et al. Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Robin A. Wa-terfield. Edited by Carolyn Dewald. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hesiod. Hesiod. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959.
Homer. The Anger of Achilles: Homer’s Iliad. Translated by Robert Graves. Garden City, N.Y.: Dou-bleday & Company, 1959.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Sophocles. Sophocles I. Translated by David Grene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Works about Hubris
Gowan, Donald E. When Man Becomes God: Humanism and Hubris in the Old Testament. San Jose, Calif.: Pickwick Publications, 1975.
Mann, Mary Anneeta. Construction of Tragedy: Hubris. Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, 2004.
