What Were Ancient Men Jealous Of?

Think of the best person you know at their job. Now picture your whole city voting to make them leave for ten years.

That was a real law in Athens, about 2,500 years ago. Once a year the city was asked whether anybody should be sent away. No crime was needed. Being too much was enough.

How the vote worked

Everybody took a broken piece of pot, scratched a name on it and dropped it on a pile. If 6,000 pieces were counted, the name written most often had to go.

Ten years away. No trial and no appeal. He kept his money and his house. He just could not come home.

The man who wrote his own name

Aristides was a general known as Aristides the Just. On voting day a stranger who could not write asked him to scratch a name onto his pot. The name was Aristides.

Aristides asked whether that man had ever done him harm. "No," said the stranger. "I do not know him. I am tired of hearing him called the Just."

Aristides wrote his own name and handed it back. He was exiled.

That story was written down centuries later, so treat it as an anecdote. The exile is real. Thousands of these pots have been dug up, and his name is on plenty of them.

A word English does not have

The Greeks called that feeling phthonos. We translate it as envy, which is too soft.

Envy means I want what you have. Phthonos means I want you not to have it. I gain nothing, and it still feels good.

The farmer-poet Hesiod split it early. One kind of rivalry makes you get up and plough because your neighbour is ploughing. The other kind makes you watch him and rot. Aristotle later kept two separate words for the same reason.

Envy came out through the eyes

The Roman word is invidia, which means looking against. People believed a look could land on you and do damage. This is the evil eye, and it was believed in rich houses and poor ones alike.

So people wore charms, hung them over doors and put them on babies. A compliment was dangerous. You did not say your harvest was good or your son was strong. A whole society quietly played its luck down.

Curses scratched in lead

Curse tablets are thin sheets of lead. You scratched your wish, folded it, sometimes drove a nail through it, and threw it into water or a grave. About 130 were found at one hot spring in Britain and 131 at one temple.

At the spring, people mostly wanted stolen things back. But notice the order. They ask for the thief to suffer first.

Elsewhere, rivals are named. Chariot racers are cursed again and again. Let his horses stumble. Not "let me win". "Let him lose".

It was about the name, not the money

We assume they envied wealth. Mostly it was honour, the Greek timē: worth and public respect.

Win the biggest games in Greece and the prize was a crown of wild olive leaves. But your city might feed you for life, or knock a hole in its wall for you to enter by. The leaves were worth nothing. Being the man who got them was worth everything.

There is only room for so many names. A neighbour rising costs you a place in the conversation.

Were men jealous of women?

In public life a woman could not hold office, so she was not a rival there. Money was different. Roman writers complain constantly about rich women, and the complaint is almost never about morals. It is about money that a man does not control.

Women scratched curse tablets too, over lovers and trade. It was never a male feeling. It was a human one. Men simply had more places to show it.

What cities did about it

Rome passed laws that capped the cost of a dinner, the number of guests and how much silver a household could own. The aim was to hide the gap, because a visible gap makes trouble. The laws were passed, ignored and passed again.

The short answer

What people could not forgive was almost never money. It was the name, the place in the conversation, and a crown of leaves.