Jill Szoo Wilson

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

Do two people have to hate each other, or is one person’s conviction enough?

Jason and Medea began as lovers. Athena and Arachne began as artists, although only one of them had the good fortune to be immortal. Achilles and Hector began on opposite sides of a war neither man had started. By the time literature finished with them, each pair had become a field guide to enmity.

Of the three, Jason and Medea had the most impressive fall. Jason arrived in Colchis under orders to retrieve the Golden Fleece, an object guarded by a sleepless dragon and protected by a king who had no intention of surrendering it. Medea, the king’s daughter and a powerful sorceress, fell in love with Jason and supplied the magic he needed to survive the impossible tasks set before him. She helped him yoke fire-breathing bulls, defeat the warriors that sprang from dragon’s teeth, and steal the Fleece itself. Then she fled with him, leaving behind her country and her family. In some versions of the myth, she also helps arrange the death of her brother during their escape, which suggests that she had moved well beyond casually supporting Jason’s career.

Their return to Greece brought no peaceful reward. When Jason’s uncle Pelias refused to restore the throne that Jason believed was rightfully his, Medea engineered Pelias’s death by persuading his daughters that they could restore their father’s youth if they cut him apart and boiled him. The promised rejuvenation failed to occur, and Jason and Medea were driven into exile. They eventually settled in Corinth, where they lived together and had two sons. Medea had now sacrificed her homeland, her family and any realistic possibility of returning to her former life. Jason, meanwhile, had acquired the Golden Fleece, survived his enemies and become the hero of an adventure whose success depended heavily on the woman he would later discard.

By the time Euripides’ Medea begins, Jason has decided that marriage to the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth, will improve his position. He presents the match as a sensible advancement for the whole family, rather like a husband announcing that his affair has opened valuable networking opportunities. He argues that a royal marriage will provide security and status for his children, apparently expecting Medea to appreciate the strategic elegance of being replaced. Creon then orders her into exile because he fears what she might do in response. His instincts, on this point, are excellent.

The quarrel between Jason and Medea has the recognizable shape of an argument between two people who possess incompatible versions of the same marriage. Medea remembers everything she risked and destroyed to make Jason’s future possible; Jason remembers the advantages he believes he gave her in return. Where she sees a betrayal of vows, history and identity, he sees a reasonable career move. He even suggests that Medea benefited considerably by leaving a foreign land and coming to live among the Greeks, which must have comforted a woman facing another exile so he could marry someone else.

Medea answers Jason’s calculation with one of her own. She sends his new bride a poisoned robe and crown, gifts that kill both the young woman and Creon when he tries to save her. She then murders the two sons she shares with Jason, denying him the family and future for which he claimed to be arranging the marriage, and escapes in a chariot sent by her grandfather, the sun god Helios. Jason ends the play alive, ruined and unable even to bury his children. The relationship has moved beyond counseling.

Athena and Arachne have no romantic history to complicate matters. Their trouble begins with professional comparison, a danger the gods handled with roughly the same composure later shown by university departments and regional theatre companies.

Arachne comes from Lydia without divine parentage or aristocratic protection. Her father earns his living dyeing wool purple, and her mother has died by the time Ovid introduces her. What Arachne possesses is talent so remarkable that nymphs leave their usual haunts to watch her work. Her reputation rests on more than the finished tapestries. Even the movement of her hands draws an audience.

People naturally assume Athena must have taught her. Arachne takes exception to this explanation, perhaps because attributing a woman’s achievement to a powerful mentor has never been the compliment people imagine it to be. Her skill belongs to her, she insists, and Athena is welcome to challenge that claim in person.

The goddess arrives disguised as an old woman, apparently hoping that age will make the warning sound like advice. She tells Arachne to enjoy her reputation among mortals and seek Athena’s forgiveness for comparing herself to a god. Arachne responds impatiently and repeats the challenge. Athena reveals herself. The women watching the exchange bow before her, but Arachne remains standing. She blushes at the sight of the goddess, then takes her place at the loom.

No independent judge is appointed, which will prove to be an unfortunate procedural oversight.

Athena weaves a portrait of divine order. At its center, she depicts her victory over Poseidon in the contest to become the patron of Athens, with the gods assembled around them as dignified witnesses. Along the edges, she adds images of mortals punished for challenging divine authority. The tapestry is beautifully executed, but it also functions as a warning: this is what the world looks like when everyone respects the hierarchy.

Arachne answers with a different history of the gods. Her tapestry shows divine figures disguising themselves to deceive mortal women, often using their power to take what the women could not freely refuse. She does not deny the gods’ greatness. She documents what greatness has permitted them to do.

Ovid says Athena can find no flaw in Arachne’s work. The goddess therefore faces a more serious problem than losing a weaving contest. Arachne has matched her skill while using the same art form to challenge the story Athena has told about divine power. Athena’s tapestry presents authority as orderly and deserved. Arachne records what authority looks like to the people forced to live beneath it.

Unable to defeat the work on artistic grounds, Athena tears it apart and strikes Arachne with her weaving tool. Arachne attempts to hang herself, and Athena intervenes in a manner that combines mercy with unusually specific career planning. She allows Arachne to live, but transforms her into a spider, leaving her to weave forever while suspended from a thread.

The rivalry begins with a question of artistic comparison and ends with a fight over who gets to describe reality. Athena might have tolerated mortal excellence as long as it confirmed the divine order. Arachne uses her talent for something more dangerous: she makes an inconvenient account of power too beautiful to dismiss.

Achilles and Hector have the cleanest credentials. They are warriors from opposing armies, and each understands that the other stands between him and survival. Yet even their enmity becomes personal only after Hector kills Patroclus, Achilles’ closest companion. Achilles returns to battle in grief, hunts Hector around the walls of Troy, kills him, and drags his body behind a chariot. This is one way to signal that a professional disagreement has escalated.

Then Priam, Hector’s elderly father, enters Achilles’ tent and asks for his son’s body. He invokes Achilles’ own father, and the two men weep together. Achilles returns Hector to him. The Iliad closes with funeral rites rather than triumph, as though the poem has spent thousands of lines building an enemy and then, at the last possible moment, remembered that enemies have fathers.

These rivalries differ in nearly every visible way. Betrayal starts one, comparison starts the next, and inherited loyalty starts the third. Jason and Medea share children and a private history that outlasts the marriage. Athena and Arachne occupy unequal places in a hierarchy, with talent threatening authority. Achilles and Hector belong to communities that had already declared each other enemies before the two men ever met.

Yet all three pairs share something beyond injury: each person comes to stand for a meaning larger than the person alone. For Medea, Jason comes to embody everything she gave up and the humiliation she got in exchange. Athena treats Arachne as a threat to her own status and to the gods’ hold on their public image. Hector, for Achilles, is grief given a shape he can chase down and kill. At some point, the enemy stops being a difficult individual and becomes an explanation.

That transformation interests me because I recently found myself wondering, with genuine curiosity and insufficient paperwork, whether I had acquired an enemy.

I have never had one before. At least, I do not think I have. I have known people who disliked me, and I have returned the favor on occasion. I have experienced disagreements with legal bills attached. Still, an enemy seems like a more formal appointment. The word suggests intention and permanence, maybe even a coat of arms.

There appears to be no licensing body. Nobody sends a letter beginning, “Congratulations. After careful consideration, we are pleased to offer you the position of Nemesis.” Most people discover they have an enemy only after the relationship is already underway and everyone has missed orientation.

The problem begins with definition. A person can hurt us without becoming an enemy. A stranger who backs into our car may ruin an afternoon, although few of us spend the following decade plotting the downfall of his bloodline. A critic can dislike our work without becoming our adversary. Even sustained conflict falls short of enmity when each person still regards the other as complicated, comprehensible, and capable of acting from mixed motives.

Enemies require a more ambitious kind of judgment. We decide what another person’s actions reveal about who that person essentially is.

The social psychologist Lee Ross described our tendency to overestimate personality and underestimate circumstance when explaining someone else’s behavior. He called it the fundamental attribution error. When someone else acts badly, we tend to see character. When we do the same thing, we reach for context: fatigue, a bad morning, unusually poor lighting. Our own behavior comes with footnotes attached; everyone else’s arrives as a verdict, no citations needed (Ross, 1977).

This imbalance proves extremely useful in the manufacture of enemies. Once a person’s conduct becomes evidence of a fixed nature, later events lose their ambiguity. A delayed reply starts to look like contempt, a public statement like malice, and even silence gets read as strategy. Any ordinary explanation begins to seem naïve because the enemy has already supplied the larger one: this is simply the sort of person who does such things.

A curious reversal follows. We feel that we understand our enemy better than we understand most people, while the category itself has reduced how much understanding we attempt. Human beings generally require years of acquaintance before claiming to know another person’s heart. Enmity speeds up the process considerably.

The word enemy also carries a moral charge that rival and opponent lack. Rivals usually want the same prize, and opponents may simply occupy the other side of a contest. Calling someone an enemy adds moral weight by suggesting a threat to something sacred.

Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral judgment helps explain how quickly a conflict can acquire this weight. Haidt argues that people often reach moral conclusions through rapid intuition and then use reasoning to support a judgment already made. In his image, the emotional dog wags the rational tail. We feel that an action is wrong, and the intellect reports for work afterward, assembling exhibits and preparing closing arguments (Haidt, 2001).

Once a dispute becomes moralized, compromise changes meaning. An ordinary disagreement permits negotiation because each person may hold a portion of the truth. A moral struggle encourages steadfastness instead. Conceding a point can feel like assisting evil with its administrative needs. Listening starts to resemble weakness, and curiosity gets uncomfortably close to betrayal.

This is why enemies rarely describe the same conflict in the same language. By the time a conflict becomes moralized, its language has already split: harm and justice, accountability and retaliation become competing names for the same events. Each vocabulary contains a complete moral world, and every new action enters that world already translated.

Haidt later argued in The Righteous Mind that moral communities bind people together around shared values, loyalties, and intuitions (Haidt, 2012). The same process that gives people belonging also identifies the figures who seem to endanger what the group cherishes. An enemy therefore performs a social service: the enemy clarifies who we are by representing who we are against.

Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s social identity theory offers an almost comically efficient account of this process. Tajfel’s experiments showed how readily people favored members of their own group after researchers divided them using distinctions with little inherent meaning. Human beings did not require ancient blood feuds, disputed territory or competing theological systems. A flimsy category was enough to produce measurable loyalty. Once people sorted themselves into an “us,” a “them” appeared with little additional encouragement (Tajfel & Turner, 1979).

A personal enemy creates the smallest possible version of this arrangement. The opposing camps may contain one person each, though they often recruit friends, relatives, colleagues, and anyone patient enough to receive screenshots. The conflict gradually develops a supporting cast. People learn which details belong in the official account and which interpretations signal loyalty. Soon the original quarrel carries the weight of a community, even when the community consists mainly of four sympathetic people in a group text.

This may explain why enmity feels so intimate. Love and hatred both involve attention, and attention grants importance. An enemy occupies the imagination. We anticipate what the person might do, rehearse what we would say, interpret new information, and revisit old scenes with the industry of a scholar preparing a revised edition.

Indifference cannot manage this workload.

Moriarty gives Holmes a single design lurking behind every crime. Hector gives Achilles’ grief, for a while, somewhere to go. Medea cannot make sense of what her sacrifices amounted to without Jason still standing in front of her, alive and remarried. The enemy organizes chaos into a face.

The arrangement carries an obvious attraction. A complicated life becomes legible. Misfortune acquires authorship. Instead of confronting a tangle of accidents, institutions, personal failures and competing motives, we can point to the person responsible. The enemy provides narrative economy.

Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found another reason conflicts harden: the people involved remember the same incident in strikingly different forms. In their study of autobiographical accounts, victims tended to describe harmful events as consequential, enduring and difficult to explain. People recalling themselves as perpetrators tended to place their conduct within a comprehensible situation, soften its effects and emphasize what led up to it. Baumeister later called this disparity the “magnitude gap” (Baumeister, Stillwell, & Wotman, 1990; Baumeister, 1997).

The injury remains the organizing fact in the victim’s memory. Everything else is measured by what followed: the trust that disappeared, the choices that had to be made afterward, the parts of life that never quite returned to their former shape. The person who caused the injury is more likely to remember the circumstances surrounding the act, including the pressure, the provocation or the bad week that made the decision feel comprehensible at the time. Memory therefore preserves a different center of gravity for each person. One carries the consequences forward; the other carries the explanation. This creates one of conflict’s crueler asymmetries, because the event that became a lasting division in one life may survive in the other as a regrettable episode whose context still seems important. The victim hears explanation as minimization, while the person offering it experiences the same explanation as essential to an honest account. Each believes the other has left out the part that makes the story true.

Because neither account feels dishonest from the inside, reconciliation asks each person to surrender the detail that makes the story morally coherent. The injured person hears context as an attempt to shrink the wound; the person offering it hears any refusal of context as a refusal to understand. By then, they are no longer arguing only about what happened. They are arguing over which version of the event deserves to govern everything that follows.

Enemies flourish in that distance. Each side believes the other has distorted events beyond recognition, and each believes a clear-minded observer would immediately take their side. The conflict develops the peculiar certainty of two maps that place the same city in different countries.

Baumeister’s work also challenges the comforting idea that people who cause harm generally experience themselves as villains. Most preserve a moral account of their own behavior. They acted in self-defense, pursued justice, answered provocation or protected something valuable. Pure malice appears far less often than the victim’s story requires, while innocent virtue appears far less often than the perpetrator’s story prefers. Human beings possess a remarkable ability to serve as both defendant and character witness in the trials conducted inside their own heads.

So far, the qualifications for an enemy appear to include injury, moral certainty, identity, and sustained attention. Hatred seems like an obvious requirement, although I am no longer convinced that it is.

Hatred may accompany enmity without defining it. Achilles hates Hector during the period when Hector carries the full force of his grief, yet the hatred changes the moment Priam enters the tent. Athena’s response to Arachne seems driven as much by threatened authority as by personal animosity. Jason and Medea hate each other by the final scene, though their hatred draws its force from the love and dependence that came before it.

Enmity can survive without hatred, drawing its force instead from fear, grievance, humiliation or fascination. In some cases, it rests on little more than the settled belief that another person stands against us and must therefore be interpreted accordingly.

This raises the question that first drew me into the subject: does enmity require mutual agreement?

Friendship does. A person may feel affection for someone who does not return it, but few would describe the resulting arrangement as a friendship. Marriage requires even more explicit participation, generally involving witnesses and a signature or two, plus cake. Enmity has looser standards.

A person can appoint us to the role without consulting us. We can become the villain in a story we have never read, our actions assigned motives we do not recognize, and even our silence read as a move. We cannot control the place we occupy in another person’s moral imagination any more than Arachne could control Athena’s reaction to the tapestry.

In that sense, one person’s conviction may be enough to create an enemy. It creates an enemy for that person.

The relationship itself remains asymmetric. One person may organize part of a life around opposition while the other carries no corresponding hatred. The conflict still exists, though it exists differently in each mind. It resembles a dance in which the partners hear separate music, an arrangement that would receive poor reviews but may continue for years.

Peace seems to operate differently. A restored relationship cannot be built by one person, yet the posture we bring to an unresolved one remains our own responsibility. Paul’s instruction in Romans is carefully qualified: “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18). The sentence acknowledges that another person may remain hostile while still assigning us responsibility for whatever lies within our reach. I may have no power to make a relationship peaceful, but I can decide how much enmity my own life will carry.

The absence of hatred does not erase history. It does, however, change what the history can command.

Without anger, the enemy loses some of the power that comes from constant attention. The person returns to human scale. Actions still have consequences, and judgments may remain. Yet the grand role begins to look faintly overdressed. The Moriarty cape hangs awkwardly on an ordinary mortal who has errands, dental appointments and a preferred brand of cereal.

Perhaps this shrinking represents the natural end of enmity. Literature usually resolves enemies through reconciliation, defeat or death because stories need decisive endings. Life allows a less dramatic possibility. The category can simply become inaccurate.

Sometimes a name that used to knock the wind out of you becomes just a name again. You remember what happened, and you may still have strong opinions about it. You can even wonder how the person is doing without wanting the relationship back. The history stays put. It just stops running the room.

An enemy is someone who has become morally significant to the story we tell about ourselves. We attribute a stable nature to the person, and that judgment quietly reinterprets everything that follows. The enemy helps explain the past and shape what we expect from the future. Hatred can intensify the arrangement, though attention alone may be enough to sustain it.

When I started this essay, I assumed an enemy was defined by the harm between two people and whatever anger remained afterward. Now I think the better question is whether the conflict still organizes your life. If you no longer need the other person to explain your past or shape your future, perhaps the role has already ended, even if you remain an enemy in someone else’s story.

I may be someone’s enemy even when I feel no hatred. Another person may be mine only for as long as the conflict continues to organize the story I tell about my own life. The titles need not match.

Perhaps that is why the great rivalries linger. Medea and Jason show how love curdles into a weapon once shared history gets divided up as evidence. With Athena and Arachne, it is power defending its own account of itself against inconvenient talent. Achilles and Hector are proof that an enemy can turn human again the moment one grief meets another.

I still find the position confusing. The qualifications remain vague, the opportunities for advancement seem poor, and I suspect I approached the matter backward. The question was never whether someone else regarded me as an enemy. People retain complete editorial control over the stories they tell themselves, even when their character development strikes me as excessive.

The only question I can answer is whether someone still occupies that place in my own story.

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References

Primary texts

Apollonius Rhodius. The Argonautica, Books III–IV.

Euripides. Medea.

Homer. The Iliad, Books XXII and XXIV.

Ovid. Metamorphoses, Books VI–VII.

Psychology

Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. W. H. Freeman.

Baumeister, R. F., Stillwell, A. M., & Wotman, S. R. (1990). “Victim and Perpetrator Accounts of Interpersonal Conflict: Autobiographical Narratives About Anger.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(5), 994–1005.

Haidt, J. (2001). “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834.

Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon Books.

Ross, L. (1977). “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 173–220.

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict.” In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.