Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad

The phrase "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad" first appears in English in exactly this form in the Reverend William Anderson Scott's book Daniel, a Model for Young Men (1854) and is attributed to a "heathen proverb."

Plato's Republic (380a) quotes a fragment attributed to Aeschylus (but otherwise unattested): θεὸς μὲν αἰτίαν φύει βροτοῖς, / ὅταν κακῶσαι δῶμα παμπήδην θέλῃ;[1] translated "A god implants the guilty cause in men / When he would utterly destroy a house.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1868 novel The Idiot, in a garbled account of the loss of 400 roubles in part 3 chapter 9, Lukyan Timofeich Lebedev tells Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin "Truly, when God wishes to punish a man, he first deprives him of reason.

[8] W. Somerset Maugham uses the phrase in his short story "Mackintosh" (1921), leaving the Latin as an untranslated warning from the protagonist: Quem deus vult perdere prius dementat.

[10] Ian Fleming's James Bond appropriates the phrase to express a related meaning: "Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make bored" in Chapter 11 of From Russia With Love.