Quote #54070
The tyrant is a child of Pride
Who drinks from his great sickening cup
Recklessness and vanity,
Until from his high crest headlong
He plummets to the dust of hope.
Who drinks from his great sickening cup
Recklessness and vanity,
Until from his high crest headlong
He plummets to the dust of hope.
Sophocles
About This Quote
This quote needs no introduction—at least for now. We're working on adding more context soon.
Interpretation
The lines present tyranny as something bred by hubris: Pride “begets” the tyrant, who then intoxicates himself on recklessness and vanity. The imagery of a “great sickening cup” suggests self-poisoning—power’s excess is not merely immoral but nauseating and destabilizing. The arc is tragic and moralized: elevation (“high crest”) contains the seed of collapse, and the fall is sudden (“headlong”), ending not in glory but in “dust,” where even hope is reduced to residue. In Sophoclean terms, the passage aligns with the Greek tragic warning that overreaching (hybris) invites ruin and that political domination is inseparable from self-deception and eventual reversal.
