The sword of Damocles describes a danger that could strike at any moment, even while everything looks calm or enviable on the surface. It is used of a threat that hangs over a person’s head, often one linked to power, wealth or success that seems precarious rather than secure. Someone in a highly paid job that could be cut without warning, or a leader whose position depends entirely on the goodwill of others, is said to be living under the sword of Damocles.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘the sword of Damocles’?
The phrase comes from a story the Roman orator Cicero put on record in his Tusculan Disputations (45 BC), about Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse, and a courtier named Damocles who flattered him constantly, praising his wealth and power and calling him fortunate above all men. To teach Damocles what that supposed good fortune actually felt like, Dionysius seated him at a lavish banquet in his own place, surrounded by every luxury, but suspended a sword above his head by a single hair. Damocles could no longer enjoy the feast, knowing the sword might fall at any instant, and the story’s point is that a ruler’s power and pleasure are always shadowed by exactly that kind of insecurity and threat.
The figurative English phrase drawing on this story is often dated only cautiously. Etymonline records the figurative use of “sword of Damocles” as appearing “by 1747,” but that looks like a conservative marker rather than a genuine first sighting. Earlier searching has turned up an occurrence decades before that: a 1625 pamphlet called Vox Vera: Or, Observations from Amsterdam already uses the image in a political warning, describing troubles that “perpetually hang over their Heads, like Damocles’s Sword, ready to doe Execution upon the least irregular Motion.” That places the phrase in English use in the early seventeenth century, applying the ancient story to the anxious insecurity of those in positions of apparent advantage, much as it still does today.