Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

144 THE ENVY OF THE GODS AND THE CONCEPT OF FATE
Agamemnon at once rejects her adulation. He does not wish to see his
path laid 'with hateful robes':
Reserve such honoursfor the gods;frail man
Should tremble for himself when he delights
With stately mien to tread o'er gorgeous robes.
In the ensuing exchange between him and his wife, she seeks to dispel
his fear of the envy of the gods. Finally Agamemnon gives way, but he
removes his shoes and enters the house over the purple carpet with
considerable uneasiness:
Let some slave unloose
These sandals, for with envious glance some god
May blast me should I walk with coveredfeet.
I blush to sully, thus, such precious robes,
Objects so costly . ... 4
This is not enough for Clytemnestra. Again she expresses what no
Greek who feared the envy of the gods would ever choose to say: 'We
shall never lack for purple carpets, we have never learnt what it is to be
poor.'
The chorus then takes up the motive of envy with the parable of a ship
on a fair voyage which can best succeed in avoiding hidden reefs if a good
measure of her cargo is voluntarily jettisoned.
The Danish sociologist Svend Ranulf, whose two-volume work on the
Greeks' remarkable concept of the envy of the gods is one of the rare
studies to deal with envy in detail, noticed unmistakable distaste in
classical scholars, who showed a general unWillingness to assume that
the ancient Greeks could ever really have ascribed to their gods anything
so monstrous and despicable as envy.
Thus the Danish philologist A. B. Drachmann, to whom Ranulf owes
the inspiration for his work, cites the subsidiary concept of the Greek
sense of cosmic harmony. It is, he maintains, an aesthetic element in
Greek thought: the envy of the gods is nothing other than the sym-
4 Op. cit., pp. 215, 216.