Who said something like whom the gods wish to destroy they first make drunk with power?

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

• Anonymous ancient proverb, wrongly attributed to Euripides. The version here is quoted as a "heathen proverb" in Daniel, a Model for Young Men (1854) by William Anderson Scott. The origin of the misattribution to Euripides is unknown. Several variants are quoted in ancient texts, as follows.
• Variants and derived paraphrases:
  • For cunningly of old

    was the celebrated saying revealed:

    evil sometimes seems good

    to a man whose mind

    a god leads to destruction.

    • Sophocles, Antigone 620-3, a play pre-dating any of Euripides' surviving plays. An ancient commentary explains the passage as a paraphrase of the following, from another, earlier poet.
  • When a god plans harm against a man,

    he first damages the mind of the man he is plotting against.

    • Quoted in the scholia vetera to Sophocles' Antigone620ff., without attribution. The meter (iambic trimeter) suggests that the source of the quotation is a tragic play.
  • For whenever the anger of divine spirits harms someone,

    it first does this: it steals away his mind

    and good sense, and turns his thought to foolishness,

    so that he should know nothing of his mistakes.

    • Attributed to "some of the old poets" by Lycurgus of Athens in his Oratio In Leocratem [Oration Against Leocrates], section 92. Again, the meter suggests that the source is a tragic play. These lines are misattributed to the much earlier semi-mythical statesman Lycurgus of Sparta in a footnote of recent editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and other works.