Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

152 THE ENVY OF THE GODS AND THE CONCEPT OF FATE
Like Nilsson, Dodds is inclined to seek a sociological explanation for
the fear of divine envy: personal circumstances in Greece were frugal
and dangerous; class conflict, changes in social stratification, and the
general advance of hitherto oppressed elements of the population may
have been responsible for the popularity of the idea that the misfortune
of the rich, great and famous was willed by God. In contrast to Homer,
for whom the rich were also as a rule especially virtuous, a poet like
Hesiod, the bard of the helots, as a king once called him, gives voice to
ideas of a divine distributive justice. 22
The most determined attempt at an interpretation in terms of class
warfare is that made by Svend Ranulf in the study already mentioned.
Dodds allows that phthonos could be regarded simply as the projection
of the unsuccessful man's resentment of the successful man, and rightly
observes: 'Certainly human and divine envy have much in common;
both, for instance, operate through the evil eye. ' But Dodds then seeks to
limit Ranulf's theory by recalling Piaget's remark that children sometimes
think the opposite of what they really want, as though reality were
scheming to thwart their wishes. Dodds agrees with A. R. Burn in seeing
signs of such ideas in Hesiod. He attributes them to the emotional
situation of the young man who, like the Greeks of this period
or the children of our Western culture, suffered a very strict parental
upbringing which he secretly called in question. Thus the resulting
repressed guilt feelings have produced an attitude of such mistrust
towards reality that even one's true wishes are, if possible, kept
concealed. 23
We would offer a much simpler explanation: The tendency observed in
children, as it were teleologically, to keep as a potential what they really
long for by thinking the exact opposite, is found in many taboos of
primitive peoples who always circumscribe what they fear or desire
in order to ward off the one and prevent the loss of the other. But beneath
this lies nothing more than the quite general fear that the
envy of companions, sublimated in the form of vaguely feared spirits or
powers, might thwart the fulfilment of the wish were this to become
known.
22 Op. cit. , p. 45.
23 Op. cit., p. 62.