Ring of Gyges
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The Ring of Gyges is a mythical magical artifact mentioned by the philosopher Plato in The Republic. It granted its owner the power to become invisible at will.
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The legend
According to the legend, Gyges of Lydia was a shepherd in the service of King Candaules of Lydia. After an earthquake, a cave was revealed in a mountainside where Gyges was feeding his flock. Entering the cave, Gyges discovered that it was in fact the tomb of an enthroned corpse who wore a golden ring, which Gyges pocketed.
Gyges then returned to his fellow shepherds, and began fumbling with the ring that he now wore. Gyges discovered that when he turned the collet of the ring to the inside of his hand, he became invisible to the other shepherds, and they began to marvel as if he had vanished. He turned the ring the other way, and he reappeared; after several trials, he determined that the ring was indeed magical, and gave him the power to turn invisible at will.
Gyges then arranged to be chosen one of the messengers who reported to the king as to the status of the flocks. Arriving at the palace, Gyges used his new power of invisibility to seduce the queen, and with her help he murdered the king, and became king of Lydia himself. King Croesus, famous for his wealth, was Gyges' descendant.
An alternative story
A very different tale of Gyges' ascension to the throne is told in Herodotus. According to Herodotus, Candaules, proud of his wife's beauty, was fond of showing her naked to various people, including Gyges, an official at his court. The queen was incensed at this treatment, and offered Gyges the choice between murdering Candaules and marrying her, or being put to death.
The moral of the story
In The Republic, Plato puts the tale of the ring of Gyges in the mouth of Glaucon, who uses it to make the point that no man is so virtuous that he could resist the temptation of being able to steal at will by the ring's power of invisibility. In contemporary terms, Glaucon argues that morality is a social construction, whose source is the desire to maintain one's reputation for virtue and honesty; when that sanction is removed, moral character would evaporate:
- Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.
- — Plato's Republic, book 2 (Benjamin Jowett trans.)
Later adaptations of the tale
Chrétien de Troyes
The character Lunette gives the title hero a ring of invisibility patterned after the Ring of Gyges in the story of Yvain, or, The Knight with the Lion by Chrétien de Troyes:
- "Please take this little ring of mine, which you will return when I shall have delivered you." Then she handed him the little ring and told him that its effect was like that of the bark which covers the wood so that it cannot be seen; but it must be worn so that the stone is within the palm; then he who wears the ring upon his finger need have no concern for anything; for no one, however sharp his eyes may be, will be able to see him any more than the wood which is covered by the outside bark.
Unlike the Ring of Gyges, however, the ring of invisibility in Yvain does not corrupt the character of its user. Yvain uses the ring to secretly observe the widow of a knight whom he had recently slain, and whom he is later to marry, in de Troyes' tale. But these events take place within the conventions of courtly love and its themes of unrequited love and stylized adultery; as such, no disparagement of Yvain's character is meant by these actions in de Troyes' tale.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Ring of Gyges is one literary source of the One Ring that appears in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings; like the ring of Gyges, the One Ring grants the power of invisibility, and corrupts the character of those who possess it. The motif of discovering a magical artifact upon the person of an enthroned corpse in a tomb is also a frequently recurring story type. It occurs, for instance, in the Doctor Who story The Five Doctors (1983) in which a ring granting a cursed immortality lies on the finger of the entombed first Time Lord.
External links
- Plato's Republic: The Ring of Gyges (http://plato-dialogues.org/tetra_4/republic/gyges.htm) by Bernard Suzanne
- Royal Ascent: the romance of monarchy in Yvain, The Hobbit, and Tigana (http://www.brightweavings.com/scholarship/royalascent.htm) by Stephen David Wark, 1998