[lit-ideas] Re: Life leads to death
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:22:24 -0700
Eric quotes RP
Robert: Never said it. [The happy man is dead.] .... Brief version:
we can't judge a man's life happy until we have seen the whole of
it, and we cannot see the whole of it until it's finished.
and comments
That's how I understood "The happy man is dead." I checked Herodotus
and my translation reads, "Call no man happy until he is dead.”
Aristotle quibbles with this somewhere in the _Nichomachean Ethics_.
Aristotle also believed that in order to call a man eudaimon one had
to consider his complete life. When he considers what 'is said,' i.e.,
common opinion, he says some confusing things, at one point even
speculating that what we say about the dead might be affected by the
lives of their descendants.
The passage in Herotodus that we seem to be talking about, reads, in
the de Sélincourt translation, revised several times, most recently in
1996, with minor changes in 2003, by John Marincola
<But whoever has the greatest number of the good things I have
mentioned, and keeps them to the end, and dies a peaceful death, that
man, Croesus, deserves to be called happy.
<Look to the end, no matter what it is you are considering. Often
enough God gives a man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins
him.>
Perseus (A. D. Godley) has
<Whoever passes through life with the most and then dies agreeably is
the one who, in my opinion, O King, deserves to bear this name. It is
necessary to see how the end of every affair turns out, for the god
promises fortune to many people and then utterly ruins them.>
I'd suggest that it is a man's life that's being considered here:
'...that man,' in 'that man, Croesus...' refers to a man's life from
beginning to end, and not to some state of him that he somehow
achieves only after death. That a man is dead now, allows us to judge
his life in its entirety. It does not mean that in death a man is happy.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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