Book 1
4
But here too there is a difficulty. For suppose a man to have lived in perfect happiness until old age, and to have come to a correspondingly happy end: he may still have many vicissitudes befall his descendants, some of whom may be good and meet with the fortune they deserve, and others the opposite; and moreover these descendants may clearly stand in every possible degree of remoteness from the ancestors in question. Now it would be a strange thing if the dead man also were to changei.e., if our estimate of his life as happy or the reverse had to change. There is no idea of the dead being conscious of what happens to their descendants (cf. 10.3 fin.), though this is inconsistently suggested by the wording of 10.5. with the fortunes of his family, and were to become a happy man at one time and then miserable at another;
5
yet on the other hand it would also be strange if ancestors were not affected at all, even over a limited period, by the fortunes of their descendants.
6
But let us go back to our former difficulty,That raised in 10.1. for perhaps it will throw light on the questionThat raised in 10.4. we are now examining.
7
If we are to look to the end, and congratulate a man when dead not as actually being blessed, but because he has been blessed in the past, surely it is strange if at the actual time when a man is happy that fact cannot be truly predicated of him, because we are unwilling to call the living happy owing to the vicissitudes of fortune, and owing to our conception of happiness as something permanent and not readily subject to change, whereas the wheel of fortune often turns full circle in the same person’s experience.
8
For it is clear that if we are to be guided by fortune, we shall often have to call the same man first happy and then miserable; we shall make out the happy man to be a sort of chameleon, or a house built on the sand.Perhaps a verse from an unknown play.
