The Ring of Gyges

Gotta be horse. Sorry, dude. Everything that’s in a compound with the word “hippo-” means that thing only big or coarse or something (if it doesn’t mean actually that thing plus horse, like a kind of chariot or whatever. Or cavalry maybe though it can mean cavalry on it’s own too.)

Nothing of the sort in Herodotus or Plutarch.

No? Beginning in chapter 8 of book 1, Herodotus tells a tale of Gyges killing the king, winning the queen, and taking the throne, his crimes according to the Republic. But in Herodotus Gyges is seen while trying to hide, and he’s compelled, under protest, to this course by the king and queen themselves. Herodotus’s Gyges even submitted himself to the Delphic oracle, who legitimized his reign.

Such an account hardly supports the lesson of Plato’s narrative, which is not to deny that the dramatic incidentals in the latter call for explanation.

Couldn’t the giant be the Space Jockey from Alien? (You gotta admit that this reading doesn’t make any less sense than Prometheus did!)

I doubt Plato invented it all, whatever “invention” might mean and whatever an “author” (here, Plato) might be. I’m thinking, maybe, something like “interventions.”

Also, there’s Polykrates. And check into Aesop (via Leslie Kurke).

Well, the ring of Polykrates is practically an anti- ring of power. Polykrates begins to worry that he’s too fortunate, that his life isn’t the sort of grim, unremitting horror that these early Greeks seem to have been more comfortable with (at least on an intellectual level), so he picks out a valuable and prized possession, this ring, and tosses it in the ocean. The idea seems to be that bad fortune has to follow good, so to avoid an uncontrolled hit from Fate, you should take the initiative and impose a misfortune on yourself. When this doesn’t work, when a fisherman finds the ring in a fish he catches and returns it to Polykrates, perspicuous observers understand that Polykrates is well and truly doomed. The gods must really be preparing some truly awful balancing misfortune for him if they won’t accept the loss of the ring as filling the bill.

Well, what makes Polykrates toss the ring isn’t really that it is powerful, at least not in the sense that it can do powerful things. He tosses it because he values it (Of course, in the unlikely event that they ever cinematize Herodotus, they probably will have him call it “My Precious!”. If they have Barry Humphries play Polykrates, I might even pay to see the resulting movie.).

You could say that Polykrates’ ring is powerful as a magnet for the outrage of the gods. The closest analogy I can think of is to the Ark of the Covenant that the Philistines capture. They are foolish enough to place it in the temple of Dagon as a trophy, whereupon that fish idol’s humanoid hands and feet drop off. So they send it off to another Philistine city, where it causes a plague, which is repeated wherever they send the damned thing, until they decide to just leave it in a ditch by the side of the road at the border with Israel.

In fact, Beneath the Earth and inside the Beast does seem a quite fitting subtitle for The Republic, what with all its sword-wielding madmen, rings of power and philosophers-king (I’ll let you imagine the contemptible cover and the “the book which inspired The Lord of the Rings” blurbs).

As for the ring of Gyges coming from Germanic sources, this seems highly implausible to me. I don’t think there is a single attested example of Germanic culture even remotely influencing the classical Greek world, so why posit one about a story which is explicitly about a Lydian king rather than the obvious hypothesis that the myth (if not totally made up) is of Lydian origin? Beside, I don’t think there is actually a ring of power in the Nibelungenlied, rather Brunhild has a ring which is taken from her by Siegfried when he rapes her. Finally, the Nibelungenlied is the semi-mythic story of Old Burgundians, a barbaric people with more than 700 years of close contact with the Roman empire at the time of writing; more than enough for Greco-Roman background culture to percolate in.

No, but Christians read him. Educated, literate Christians. Monks. That would presumably be the path of transmission. I am speculating utterly.

My impression as well. And I don’t think this is solely baseless speculations: Wikipedia says that the most likely common origin of the relevant sagas and Old Germanic lieds are the old legal and historical founding texts of the Burgundians; texts which were compiled under the overarching influence of the Church and Roman intelligentsia (one and the same thing in the Germanic kingdoms of the 5th/6th century anyway).

Z,

Well, Galatians were Gauls who made it to the center of Asia Minor and established a short-lived kingdom but long-standing cultural presence there. The Dying Gaul is one of these chaps from somewhere near Ankara, not a Gaul from modern-day France. If armies from Gaul could reach Asia Minor in good enough shape to capture cities, surely myths could make the same trip from a closer Germany.

We’re not sure who the Lydians were, or where they came from, and, to the point, who they may have shared myths with. It doesn’t seem terribly likely that Lydians lived in Asia Minor from forever. And it’s not as if you have to posit Germans as the source of the myth, we could just as easily be talking about something from “the Steppes” that traveled both west to Germany and south to Asia Minor, perhaps centuries apart, and who knows with what group of storytellers, missionaries, merchants or conquerors — perhaps with the Lydians.

Messy as the present is, we have no reason to imagine that the past wasn’t even messier. Asia Minor is now Turkey, and the Turks sure aren’t any more indigenous there from forever than the Lydians, or the Hittites, or the Galatians. We’re pretty sure that the Turks are “originally” from “the Steppes”, which is a lot more certainty than we have for the Lydians.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Invisibility of Crowds

JB,

The idea of ventriloquizing from inside the horse suggests a connection to the Phalerian Bull. The tyrant Phalerus would lock his victims in this bronze bull, then place the bull over a fire. Their screams would come out through the narrow holes in the device as musical notes, sort of like a tea kettle on the boil.

Exactly like what didn’t happen to Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego!
Jim Buck @ 26, you are cracking my shit up.

But let’s get down to brass tacks, everybody; who’s in favor of invisibly doing evil?! You alone, I mean. Not generally–that would be both wrong, and–more importantly–annoying. Assholes stealing your stuff, fuck that. And look, the first rule of invincible magical powers club is that you don’t tell anyone about your magical invincible powers, and that’s the next 15 rules till you get to “if you give them to anyone for 45 seconds as a demonstration, she better be chained to something and have no idea where the key is.” As to why will I even be demonstrating them to her I’m sure I don’t know. Oh, wait, no, duh. I’ll just hand it to my sister without even making any pre-conditions, right. But her friends will had better be chained to something but good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dCLQWW7GQo

Invisibility, by means of a magic ring, may yet become visible by the light of Diogenes’s lantern; That’s why Gyges took the messenger gig–playing the sheep over at the dog-throttler’s palace for so long! Mr invisible standing there as Mrs Caundaules is shewed nude! Stands to treason when you think about it.

I don’t know anything about the horse, but something struck me as I read the story. We’ll need to go to the amazing Myth and Myth-Makers by John Fiske as it’s online in project gutenberg, and amazing.
As it’s a 19th century anthropology text we’ll be needing all of King Frodi’s salt to accompany us.

He describes stories where someone hears a sound, goes into a new cave, and returns with treasure as lightning myths. It’s fairly persuasive in general although I suspect philology has come a long way since then. The outcome of the story is usually the finder gets trapped underground, or gets cut in two. The only lightning myth he mentions with invisibility, and I’ve heard no others until I saw this greek one today, is the raven-stone. There’s little talk of this on google so he may have invented it.

But in general there exists a class of myth where there’s an event, someone goes underground, sees treasure, gets trapped by doing something stupid like trying to take it. I had thought these stories were well known, by more than 19th century anthropologists, even if the link between them wasn’t.

So if we start from there, and make a reasonable assumption that all of Plato’s audience were familiar with one of the basic stories in this vein, could the ring be a change to the ending rather than a perfect retelling or fitting-in of an existing story? Gyges would be reasonably described as being trapped in plato’s cave after he gets the ring after all, and a switch here seems quite artful.

Also, I do think people above are getting a bit hung up on the fact it’s a ring. If you’re looking for similarities elsewhere I think it’s better to find something that does the same thing rather than something that is the same object. Function survives in these stories much more than form.

The first chapter of Marc Shell’s The Economy of Literature is devoted to the “The Ring of Gyges.” Perhaps it will help (I’ve not read it in years).

“Is there additionally a sense that delving into ‘secrets under the earth’ is something atheistic, in a natural philosophy sort of way? Like the teachings of Anaxagoras?”

Hell yes. Or like the teachings of Homer:

“and beneath did Poseidon cause the vast earth to quake and the steep crests of the mountains. All the roots of many-fountained Ida were shaken and all her peaks, and the city of the Trojans, and the ships of the Achaeans. And seized with fear in the world below was Aidoneus, lord of the shades . . . Lest above him the earth be cloven by Poseidon, the Shaker of the Earth, and his abode be made plain to view for mortals and immortals”

That is, if there were the right kind of earthquake, then the possibly naturalistic truth about the so-called underworld might be revealed.

It occurs to me that the earth, unlike the heavens, is not amenable to the kind of de-mythologizing yet philosophically edifying mathematical inquiry the guardians get in Book 7.

Z,

One of the most frustrating things about trying to understand whatever dramatic or ironic twist Plato is trying to create by speaking in dialogues rather than treatises, is placing the references. Does he give Thrasymachus the lines he gives him because he was this publicly known figure whose publicly known words and deeds would give those lines all sorts of significance that is, sadly, totally lost on us? Is Thasymachus of the The Republic just made up, maybe there having been a real person of that name, but used here just as an empty name? Something in between? Unless somebody digs up the Complete Works of Thrasymachus from the sands of Egypt, or some such, we’ll never know.

The story of Gyges is certainly presented as something the listeners would have heard about, not something that Glaucon is making up on the spot. Presented in an era that was just two generations into literacy, and not understanding how extensively and deeply the written word had replaced oral tradition (We don’t really, for example, know how new and original what Herodotus and Thucydides did was. Was there already an extensive genre of history, with hundreds to thousands of works of history? Or did they invent the genre?), we have no way to gauge whether the source that the interlocutors are expected to be familiar with was an oral tradition, or some sort of novel (Did they have detective novels at this time? Who knows?), or some sort of anthology of myth. or some sort of political tract making exactly the point, quite explicitly, that Vernant is after. Add in the notion that, as you suggest, this whole story of the ring is meant as a symbol of the way the new-fangled literacy and money themselves changed power relationships, and you have a minefield of potential irony in which we have no idea what Plato invented in terms of story elements or the meaning of such elements, and what was already there that he is just playing off.

Consider how Plato plays off his source material in the one case (at least in this dialogue, for, say, the Symposium we have quite a bit of Aristophanes’ writings to compare.) of a Platonic reference we can check. He has Socrates attack the poets, name-checking Homer as the arch-poet, at the end, as if poetry was meant to be a fake and untrustworthy mimesis of true techne. That’s just such an utterly loony take on what Homer was trying to do, that you know Socrates is up to some infernal bit of irony. If you look through Homer trying to identify passages where his characters talk at all about any sort of technical matters, you don’t find much beyond the rare talk of some bit of warcraft (e.g., Odysseus advises his companions to take off their clanky armor when they set out for some scout patrolling at night, advice you get in Ranger School up to this day.), and it really seems obtuse to imagine that Homer intended discussions of fine points of patrolling as the substance of his poetry, like he was Tom Clancy or something. Now, one of the more prominent of these rare technical passages in Homer is Nestor’s chariot-racing advice to his son at the funeral games for Patroclus. It’s pretty basic stuff (lean into a curve!), and Homer clearly uses it not at all as a bit of procedural, but to give us a picture of a decrepit old Nestor who now has to compete vicariously through his son, somewhat pathetically, given the lame obviousness of the technical advice. His son gets the emotional point, and cheats to win for his father when cheating becomes necessary to win. This sets up a dispute over the distribution of prizes. Achilles has to judge how to adjust the allotment of prizes, and having overheard this pathetic bit of technical advice, and taking it for its emotional content, is what finally reconciles Achilles to the essential unfairness of the great game, and he does what Agamemnon failed to do and gives up his own goodies to give Nestor a consolation prize for being old and decrepit and having to live through his son. This distribution of prizes is both what the Iliad is all about, and what Book X reveals at the end that The Republic is all about.

No way you could have gotten all that multi-level reference and back-reference from the indictment of Homer as a mimetic poet unless you had the Iliad to look at and digest. We don’t have the source of the Gyges story to compare, so there’s no way to know if anything as complicated and involved is intended, or just what that involved and complicated content might be if unpacked. Maybe someday there’ll be an earthquake, and a hidden chamber will be revealed full of political tracts from proto-literate Lydia…

Glen Tomkins,
Thank you for your deep and instructive comments. They are really eye-opener.

Just to get back to Holbo’s initial question about the dramatic details, I’d like to address the shepherd aspect. Shepherds clearly do represent a kind of justice, as they tend to their flocks not only in order to profit some day but also for the flocks’ own good. Thus in Homer the epithet “shepherd of the people,” used to describe the various kings, establishes a paternalistic relationship between basileus and laos. But those are figural shepherds. A literal shepherd is pre-political — his “rule” over his sheep can only prefigure the political community that obtains between human beings. So it makes sense that the shepherd is a figure of political potential, good to think with when you want to run a political thought experiment. (And there’s something darkly ironic about the fact that the empowered Gyges does not turn out to be a very good pastor of his people in the event — the tyrant, despite being a human being, is worse to his fellow citizens than humans are to beasts.)

Shepherds also inhabit a world on the border between human affairs and those of the gods (the “liminal space” much beloved by academics). Being closer to nature and to the unknown, the shepherd has (again this word) the potential to undergo supernatural experiences. Thus the poet Hesiod is visited by the Muses, who give him the power of song, while tending his flocks on Mt Helicon; Anchises the shepherd is visited by Aphrodite while in his shepherd’s hut; and Paris gets the chance to judge an immortal beauty contest while herding on Ida.

It is also worth noting here that there was a tradition that Zaleucus, the mythical lawgiver of the polis of Epizephyrian Locri in Italy, was a shepherd (perhaps even a slave) who was chosen lawgiver by the Locrians following an oracle; he then received the law code from Athena in a dream. The figure of the lawgiver, like that of the archaic tyrant, was often thought to be so exceptional as to be explicable only by recourse to the divine. Orthagoras, the tyrant of Sicyon, was the son of a butcher (mageiros — really a kind of all-purpose butcher and cook for sacrifices, so again close to livestock), and his rule was supposedly prophesied by an oracle. (The story is very similar to that of Cypselus, the first tyrant of Corinth, although I’m not sure what the occupation was of Cypselus’ father Eetion.)

So the shepherd aspect makes sense — a shepherd is at the same time the unlikeliest of rulers *and* just the sort of person who might be magically promoted to a position of power.

Getting back to the dramatic details, as Scrantonius suggests, let me suggest another take on the giant stature of the ring-wearer that Gyges’ ancestor finds.

He’s a giant because he’s from the remote mythical past when giants roamed the earth, the Golden Age. This is the same Golden Age that is the time of the best republic, when philosopher kings ruled. So far, so good, we have a fairly conventional trope about the elder days being better than things are now.

It gets complicated when we get to the devolution from the best republic that Socrates gets into in the second half of the Republic, with monarchy declining to timocracy, and then to oligarchy, and finally to the gravity sump of democracy, in which all impulses compete in the soul of the demos on an equal footing. This democracy sump is explicitly identified with Athens’ current state. But, to the conventional, one-way, secular decline from noble to base metal, this fillip is added at the end. Democracy is the breeding ground for tyranny, it will give way to tyranny because it is without direction or self-control. But tyranny has this possible outcome, that it can start the cycle over again by way of the tyrant dictating the rule of reason. We can have the Golden Age, best republic, again, the rule of philosopher kings, but only by way of the tyranny that democracy leads to.

So one of the bright, talented, energetic young men whom Socrates cultivates, who see themselves as being in Achilles’ position of living in debased times when their virtue doesn’t get its due allotment of prizes, dreams of a device that will reset history back to the Golden Age when people like himself will get their due. The whole scheme is not clear to him yet, Socrates has to spend the rest of the dialogue sketching out the whole vast pattern, but the narrator of the Gyges story is already fixated on this power of generating theories that will get him and those like him back in charge of things, as it was back in the days when giants roamed the earth.

Add the ring of power myth to the Age of Metals myth, and you transform a story of decline from original glory to the present sorry state, into a story of repeating, maybe endlessly repeating, cycles, in which the Golden Age can only be reset from the state of maximum decline.

To return from the abstract scheme to practical implications, what this new take on the conventional story of one-way decline introduces, is the idea that bold, tyrannical action is the only way to get us back upstream to the Golden Age from our present gravity sump of democracy. Bandying such ideas with ambitious young men who thought like this, and some of whom acted on these ideas, is what got Socrates in that bit of legal trouble.

Back-packing Paris nicked Menelaus’s wife. No magic ring needed, just a cattle-herder ethic.

Draupnir

ærkriufltkriuriþonglæstæpontol

South Asian stories of rings revealing that a husband accusing his wife of infidelity was actually the unfaithful one. (Look for Wendy Doniger.)

These all seem to be magical ring things that may have been thought up in ignorance of Plato (if not of Tolkein). If Wikipedia says Germanic myths are just Classical myths recast, well, isn’t that what classicists have been saying since Germanic myths became the focus of scholarly study? If scholarhship had begun with Germanic subjects, would Gyges magic ring be explained as Draupnir cheapened?

This discussion now makes me read it as the “Ring of Gygax”. I may have failed a saving throw.

I like the interpretation that a shepherd looks after his flock of sheep in a similar way to a ruler over the people (cf. elsewhere in The Republic), and so the story of Gyges is not just about any guy gone bad, but specifically a ruler gone bad.

This “Ring of Gyges” notion is still very topical. Compare Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, for example. There, the idea is very much that if our government officials can act in secret, then — Gyges like — they will probably get up to all sorts of bad stuff.

I can’t recall if this aspect is in Plato or not, but in the contemporary version you get the idea that there is some form of adverse selection going on. Sure, you or I would not go the full Gyges if we got a magic ring, but the sort of person who is in high government office — by reason of what they probably had to do to get there — is exactly the kind of person you do not want to trust with the magic ring. The stonger, pathologizing, version of this account is to suggest that politicians are clinical psychopaths, that is they have something biologically different with their brains that causes them to behave differently in the Gyges-like scenario. (The even stronger version of this is to say that the ruling class are actually extraterrestrial lizards, and not human at all).

Now if someone wants to suggest that Assange is also exactly the kind of person you wouldn’t trust with the magic ring, for fear mght they become like some Alan Moore character — well yeah, and this is probably also in line with the spirit of The Republic.

I can help on a super tiny technical point: logging into Wikipedia and turning on Visual Editor in your editing preferences makes it a lot easier to edit.

John,

It probably is true that in antiquity Cicero’s Republic was more widely read, probably a lot more widely read, than Plato’s work of the same name. So, sure a mention of the story in De Officiis is much more likely to have gotten the story to 6-7th century Burgundians than its original locus.

But how likely is it that De Officiis would have been read by anybody in those parts in that era? Knowing the route of transmission of that work would be some help, but I wouldn’t even know where to start looking for that information, since I’ve been away from the game for so long.

Even if it turns out that the history of transmission tells us that mss of De Officiis were common as dirt in 7th century Burgundy, that only gets us opportunity. There’s always tons of ideas and images floating around, or parading on the stage of the Cave, so to speak. Why do some stick in the popular mind of a given era, and others don’t? My point is that there has to be motive, some reason that people perpetuate one of these ideas or images, but others don’t resonate with them.

I think that Z’s suggestion, which he attributes to Vernant (We have our own history of transmission going!), about the myth of the Ring having resonance with people to whom money and literacy aren’t entirely familiar, is convincing. Socrates was taught as a child by people to whom literacy and money were new. Germanic and other “barbarian” tribes lived for centuries at the edge of a Mediterranean world run by money and literacy, but never fully incorporated them, so they were new to them for centuries.

If you accept that idea, then it seems to me that looking for Plato, via Cicero or not, as the source of the Germanic Ring myth, is just multiplying causes unnecessarily. We’re saying that a literary source gave rise to an oral tradition that was then written down more recently. Why not just go with an oral tradition for the whole era before it was finally written down? Imagine that there was this oral tradition that resonated with all sorts of tribes on the borders of the money/literacy culture, and so was preserved over centuries in that tradition. Within the culture, maybe the odd intellectual like Cicero, someone who has done enough thinking that money and literacy have their sheen of familiarity rubbed off and he or she is able to see them for the peculiar institutions they are, find the ring story worth repeating. But everyone else in a “civilized” culture doesn’t see money or literacy as at all problematic, so the ring story just doesn’t resonate and enter popular culture.

Sure, this universal barbarian border tribe theory of the Ring story means that you have to invent things, but it seems to me that our knowledge of idea transmission in antiquity is such that you have to do lots of inventing no matter what route you choose.

And, ha, I’ve hit upon yet another layer to the myth. The ring of invisibility is the magical power that being familiar and foundational to your culture possesses to hide the true nature of an institution. In our culture we can’t see, without special effort, how monstrous money and literacy really are. They pass instead as positively good things, because they possess this ring of invisibility.

But let’s get down to brass tacks, everybody; who’s in favor of invisibly doing evil?!
Well, not the Lone Ranger for a start. And invisible to mortals is not necessarily invisible to the Gods, whose partiality, manifesting as a wink, is hardly an impairment to divine pan optics. No! invisibility (in this case) is just another means of making the lesser argument the stronger; and heeding your own diamonion–rather than that of a tyrant, amplified through the bowels of a bronze horse. (IMHO)