Homo Homini Lupus
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, or in its unabridged form , is a Latin proverb meaning literally 'man is a wolf to man'. It is used to refer to situations where a person has behaved comparably to a
wolf The wolf (''Canis lupus''; : wolves), also known as the grey wolf or gray wolf, is a Canis, canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of Canis lupus, subspecies of ''Canis lupus'' have been recognized, includin ...
. In this case, the wolf represents predatory, cruel, and generally inhuman qualities.


History

A variation of the proverb appeared as line 495 in the play '' Asinaria'' by
Plautus Titus Maccius Plautus ( ; 254 – 184 BC) was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by Livius Andro ...
: , which has been translated as "Man is no man, but a wolf, to a stranger," or "A man is a wolf rather than a man to another man, when he hasn't yet found out what that man is like."
Seneca the Younger Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger ( ; AD 65), usually known mononymously as Seneca, was a Stoicism, Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, a statesman, a dramatist, and in one work, a satirist, from the post-Augustan age of Latin literature. Seneca ...
wrote, contrarily, in his '' Epistulae morales ad Lucilium'' (specifically, Epistula XCV, paragraph 33), , which has been translated as "man, an object of reverence in the eyes of man".
Erasmus Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus ( ; ; 28 October c. 1466 – 12 July 1536), commonly known in English as Erasmus of Rotterdam or simply Erasmus, was a Dutch Christian humanist, Catholic priest and Catholic theology, theologian, educationalist ...
included the proverb in his ''
Adagia ''Adagia'' (singular ''adagium'') is the title of an annotated collection of Greek language, Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch Humanism, humanist Erasmus, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus' repository of p ...
'', writing of the variation by Plautus, "Here we are warned not to trust ourselves to an unknown person, but to beware of him as of a wolf". The philosopher, theologian, and jurist
Francisco de Vitoria Francisco de Vitoria ( – 12 August 1546; also known as Francisco de Victoria) was a Spanish Roman Catholic philosopher, theologian, and jurist of Renaissance Spain. He is the founder of the tradition in philosophy known as the School of Sala ...
(in Latin, Franciscus de Victoria) wrote in one of his ''Relectiones Theologicae'' that the poet
Ovid Publius Ovidius Naso (; 20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he i ...
disagreed with the proverb: Man,' says Ovid, 'is not a wolf to his fellow man, but a man.
Thomas Hobbes Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679) was an English philosopher, best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan (Hobbes book), Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. He is considered t ...
drew upon the proverb in his ''
De Cive ('On the Citizen') is one of Thomas Hobbes's major works. The book was published originally in Latin from Paris in 1642, followed by two further Latin editions in 1647 from Amsterdam. The English translation of the work made its first appearance ...
'', writing in the dedication "To speak impartially, both sayings are very true; That Man to Man is a kind of God; and that Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe. The first is true, if we compare Citizens amongst themselves; and the second, if we compare Cities." Hobbes was describing the tendency of people to act fairly and generously toward other people in the same society and the tendency of societies to act deceptively and violently toward other societies, or as he stated, "In the one, there's some analogy of similitude with the Deity, to wit, Justice and Charity, the twin-sisters of peace: But in the other, Good men must defend themselves by taking to them for a Sanctuary the two daughters of War, Deceit and Violence".
Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies seen as originating fro ...
agreed with the proverb, writing in his '' Civilization and Its Discontents'', "Men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. ''Homo homini lupus''. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?". The primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal disagreed with the proverb, writing that it "contains two major flaws. First, it fails to do justice to canids, which are among the most gregarious and cooperative animals on the planet (Schleidt and Shalter 2003). But even worse, the saying denies the inherently social nature of our own species." In response to the Johnson–Jeffries riots in the United States in 1910, Russian Zionist activist
Ze'ev Jabotinsky Ze'ev Jabotinsky (born Vladimir Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky; 17 October 1880  – 3 August 1940) was a Russian-born author, poet, orator, soldier, and founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement and the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in O ...
wrote of the parallels between racism experienced by African Americans and antisemitism experienced by European Jews, in an article entitled "Homo Homini Lupus". Bartolomeo Vanzetti, after being convicted of murder, along with Nicola Sacco, in 1927, said that their pending execution would become an emblem "of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man".


See also

*
Aggressionism Aggressionism is a philosophical theory that the only real cause of war is human aggression, which refers to the "general tendency to attack members of one's species." It is argued that aggression is a natural response to defend vital interests ...
*''
Bellum omnium contra omnes , a Latin phrase meaning "the war of all against all", is the description that Thomas Hobbes gives to human existence in the state-of-nature thought experiment that he conducts in ''De Cive'' (1642) and ''Leviathan'' (1651). The common modern ...
'' * Big Bad Wolf *
Misanthropy Misanthropy is the general hatred, dislike, or distrust of the human species, human behavior, or human nature. A misanthrope or misanthropist is someone who holds such views or feelings. Misanthropy involves a negative evaluative attitude t ...
*
List of Latin phrases This is a list of Wikipedia articles of Latin phrases and their translation into English. To view all phrases on a single, lengthy document, see: List of Latin phrases (full). Lists of pages * List of Latin phrases (A) * List of Latin phrases ( ...
* Wolf in sheep's clothing * Wolves in folklore, religion and mythology


Notes

{{reflist Latin philosophical phrases Metaphors referring to wolves Competition Interpersonal conflict Violence Philosophical phrases