Homo homini lupus

The Latin sentence homo homini lupus comes from the comedy Asinaria (Eseleien) by the Roman comedy poet Titus Maccius Plautus (approx. 254-184 BC).

In Plautus' original text, however , lupus is at the front. There the merchant literally says to Leonida:

lupus est homo homini , non homo, quom qualis sit non novit.

Translation:

A wolf is man to man, not a man, as long as he does not know what kind the other is.

Alternatively in the translation by Artur Brückmann :

Because man is a wolf to man, not a man. At least that applies as long as you don't know each other.

The phrase became known through the English state theorist and philosopher Thomas Hobbes , who used it in the dedication of his work De Cive to William Cavendish , the Count of Devonshire. Hobbes uses Homo homini lupus to describe the relationship between the individual man-made states:

“Now both sentences are certainly true: Man is a god for man , and: Man is a wolf for man ; that when you compare the citizens with one another, that when you compare the states with one another. There one approaches likeness to God through justice, love and all the virtues of peace; here even the good have to use martial virtues, violence and cunning, ie the predatory behavior of wild animals, to protect them against the corruption of the bad. "

The fact that Hobbes limited the meaning of the sentence to the relationship between the states and their armed conflicts is often not taken into account.

Stylistically, the sentence contains a polyptoton and an alliteration .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Titus Maccius Plautus: Asinaria, 495 . In: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/plautus/asinaria.shtml .
2. ^ Plautus: Asinaria in the Gutenberg-DE project
3. ↑ Dedication to Se. Exc. the Earl William of Devonshire, my honorable lord (at zeno.org ), from Thomas Hobbe's Doctrine of the Citizen . Original in Latin: "Profecto utrumque vere dictum est, Homo homini Deus , & Homo homini Lupus ". Elementa philosophica de cive. Amsterdam 1657, p. 10 books.google