the ring of polycrates
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The phrase “turn up like a bad penny” turns out to have a provenance far more pedestrian (and far less insidious) than the one I had imagined.
“The clipping and counterfeiting of coins,” explains an anonymous online lexicographer, “was rife in the Middle Ages—long before the standardisation of coinage was reliably enforced.” For this reason, he or she continues, it was probable that a man who faked or defaced coins (or anyone else, for that matter) would eventually receive such a coin in his change. A few more historical details and citations follow. Then the author concludes: The intended meaning of A bad penny always turns up is captured by the modern-day expression, “what goes around, comes around.” How dull and how different from the nightmare scenario I imagined. The “bad penny” of this phrase was, I had thought, the evil twin of the silver florin which Leopold Bloom marks and “casts adrift on the waters of civic finance” never to see again: An ill-omened coin however much you tried to be rid of which would always find its way back into your hand—the numismatic equivalent of the ring of Polycrates. The historical anecdote is worth recalling. Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, had enjoyed oppressing people for forty years before he began to worry that his luck would run out. It occurred to him that he should throw a precious ring into the sea. It may be that he thought the bad luck he had not had was like an unpaid debt he needed to defray; it may be that the idea was just to bribe the fates. In any case, the coin was found in the belly of a fish and brought back to him. Soon after, Polycrates was captured by the Persian general Orontes and crucified. If it were ever to be depicted on film, the scene in which Polycrates sees his ring again and hears the amazing story of its recovery would call for a trombone shot. I can easily imagine his superstitious terror in that moment. To a tyrant, a gold ring is of no great value. Let us therefore suppose that he tossed it into the sea with a sort of defiant jocularity. The discovery that by doing so he had unwittingly set up the punch line of a brutal joke at his own expense must have left him feeling obscurely betrayed by himself—as though his own body of flesh and blood and bones had conspired with the material cosmos of which it was a part in order to destroy him. |