Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

NEMESIS 149
means is dislike, a general distaste for what is unjust. The goddess
Nemesis is of much later date; she is the guardian of just measure (no one
having too much or too little), but she is also the express enemy of too
much happiness.
Already in Herodotus, Nilsson discovers a tendency to call the divinity
'envious.' He uses the word phthonos, also found in Pindar, as an
alternative for Nemesis. However, Nilsson is doubtful about the translation
'envy,' whose connotations, he feels, are too malevolent. 14 The
confrontation of man's hubris and its consequence of divine nemesis
appears early. In Homer, who used both terms, hubris means presumption,
trespass. The underlying conception, in the sense of the
Moira, is that of a man who has taken portions in excess of his due.
Gradually there grew out of this the idea of justice. Later it was to mean
not only equality before the law, but also 'a fair share of the goods of the
state, both spiritual and material. This idea of equality was deep-seated;
it was the driving force behind constitutional struggles, and upon it
democracy was built. ,15
Oddly enough, as Nilsson demonstrates, the conception of hubris and
nemesis gradually came to be applied to distributive justice in the life of
the individual: 'The higher a man climbs, the lower he must fall so that a
balance is achieved. He is best off whose fortune is modest, since his
misfortune will be modest in proportion. ,16 In this conception, avoid-
. ance of envy is already clearly apparent in the form in which it is found in
nearly every culture.
Nilsson leaves no room for doubt as to the major part played by envy,
and fear of it, among the Greeks. He cites Svend Ranulf's comprehensive
account, with one aspect of which, however, he disagrees: 'Envy is
indeed a prominent trait, especially of Athenian democracy; but as
Ranulf's examples are mainly those of divine envy, he falls into the error
of conceiving the gods individually, as Homer does, whereas in fact envy
is ascribed only to the gods in general, and of isolating this conception
from that of fate of which it is correlative. "7
14 Op. cit., p. 699.
15 Op. cit., pp. 699 f.
16 Op. cit., p. 700.
17 Op. cit., p. 696.