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Sword of Damocles Victorian language of flowers. The Victorian language of flowers allowed lovers to communicate messages to each other through flowers instead of words. The following flower meanings are given by the official Royal Wedding 2011 website: • Sweet William – gallantry • Lily-of-the-Valley – return of happiness • Hyacinth – constancy of love • Myrtle – love. Sword of Damocles – (миф.) дамоклов меч; жизнь в постоянном страхе Damocles (literally: “Fame of the People”) is a figure featured in a single moral anecdote commonly referred to as the Sword of Damocles. The figure belongs properly to legend rather than Greek myth. The Roman orator Cicero tells the story of the Sword of Damocles in his “Tusculan Disputations”, by which means it passed into the European cultural mainstream. Damocles was an obsequious courtier in the court of Dionysius II of Syracuse, a fourth-century BC tyrant of Syracuse, Italy. Pandering to his king, Damocles exclaimed that, as a great man of power and authority surrounded by magnificence, Dionysius was truly extremely fortunate. Dionysius then offered to switch places with Damocles, so that he could taste that very fortune first hand. Damocles quickly and eagerly accepted the King’s proposal. He sat down in the king’s throne surrounded by every luxury, but Dionysius arranged that a huge sword should hang above the throne, held at the pommel only by a single hair of a horse’s tail. Damocles finally begged the tyrant that he be allowed to depart, because he no longer wanted to be so fortunate. By doing that, Dionysius had successfully conveyed a sense of the constant fear in which the great man lives. Cicero uses this anecdote for reaching the conclusion that virtue is sufficient for living a happy life. Cicero asks: Does not Dionysius seem to have made it sufficiently clear that there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms? 160