Meaning
An ever-present danger hanging over someone apparently fortunate - doom suspended by a thread above a comfortable life. The phrase is for prolonged, quiet menace: the indictment pending, the diagnosis expected, the margin about to be called. Serious register, usually constructed as hanging over someone; it implies the danger is constant and the holder of fortune cannot relax, which was Cicero's point. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Cicero tells the anecdote in his Tusculan Disputations (5.61), likely from the lost Sicilian history of Timaeus: Damocles, an obsequious courtier of the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, envied the king's fortune, so Dionysius offered to trade places for a day. Damocles enjoyed the banquet until he looked up and saw a sharpened sword hanging over the throne by a single horsehair - the constant fear under which a powerful man actually lives - and begged to be relieved of such happiness. Cicero ends his fifth disputation on it: nothing is happy for him over whom terror always looms. The image ran from Horace's drawn sword over the impious feaster, through Chaucer's sharp sword hanging by a subtle thread, to the emblem books; John F. Kennedy used it at the United Nations on 25 September 1961 - every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads - and Khrushchev wanted the Tsar Bomba to hang like the sword over the imperialists' heads.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a sword of Damocles hanging over
- hang like the sword of Damocles
- the Damocles sword
Usage Examples
- The unresolved inquiry hung over the ministry like the sword of Damocles for eleven months.
- With the loan callable at any moment, the developer worked under a sword of Damocles named liquidity.
- Every extension granted to the club was another horsehair holding off the sword of Damocles.