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HAPPINESS in HERODOTUS Herodotus Is a Historian of War: The Symbolae Osloenses 85, 2011 HAPPINESS IN HERODOTUS CAROLYN DEWALD CLASSICAL STUDIES PROGRAM,BARD COLLEGE, NY, USA In conversation with Croesus, Herodotus' Solon makes two important points about human happiness: a) any human life is filled with change, so a person's happiness cannot be evaluated properly until he or she has died; b) the rich and powerful are as subject to change as anyone else. This paper explores, first, how often and in what ways rich and powerful barbarians and Greeks fail to achieve happiness in the Histories and, secondly, the ways in which the conditions of human life for everyone, rich and poor, slave and free, male and female, as H. depicts them, really do fall far short of the seven kinds of happiness achieved, Solon says, by the otherwise unknown Tellus of Athens. Five of these kinds of happiness are ‘Odyssean’ and involve adequate health and prosperity, with surviving descendants, in a flourishing city. Two might rather be called ‘Iliadic,’ because they involve gaining kleos through a glorious death. Herodotus, however, redefines that kleos so that it comes not only from death in battle but from any death when honored and memorialized in community. An important part of Herodotus' own task as an investigator and recorder of erga megala te kai thômasta is to give recognition, and so something of this kleos (Tellus' seventh and most enduring kind of happiness) to all of the many individuals who appear on the wide and generous canvas of his Histories' narrative. [Among the Trausoi] whenever a baby is born, its relatives gather around and grieve for the troubles it is going to have to endure now that it has been born, and they recount all the suffer- ings of human life (ta anthrôpêia panta pathea). When anyone dies, however, they bury him in high spirits and with jubilation, on the grounds that he has been released from so many ills and is now in a perfectly happy state (en pasêi eudaimoniêi). Herodotus 5.41 Herodotus is a historian of war: the nine books of his Histories are structured as a long narrative concerning the growth of the Medo-Persian Empire, by military conquest, from about 650 to the late 480s BCE (Books One through Six), and then the attempt by Xerxes to conquer mainland Greece between 481 and 479 2 (Books Seven through Nine). In the nine-book story of Persian imperial ambi- tion, almost no one is exempt from the effects of war: temples are looted, cities in the path of armies are plundered and fall, families and individuals are dislocated or destroyed. And of course, soldiers kill and die. As Croesus disingenuously tells his captor, Cyrus, a god must have made him initiate the war with Persia, for “no one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons” (1.87). The twenty ships that Athens sends to help the http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00397679.2011.631357 52 HAPPINESS IN HERODOTUS Ionian Revolt are “the beginning of evils for both Greeks and barbarians” 3 (5.97.3). This is not a narrative designed to limn a lot of human happiness. Herodotus certainly does not celebrate human happiness, if it is defined as an 4 evanescent feeling of pleasure or Pindaric exaltation. Happiness defined roughly as ‘the good life,’ however, is a concept given some prominence in the Histories because of the programmatic placement of the story of Solon and Croesus 5 (1.29-33). The narrative of Book One begins in earnest with the story of Croesus, king of Lydia, and his defeat by Cyrus the Persian in 546 BCE. Croesus is important because his defeat by Cyrus brings true eastern imperial autocracy to the shores of the Aegean and faces the Greek communities that 6 ring the East Aegean with a serious threat to their values and their way of life. But Herodotus does not start his Croesus narrative with the war between Croesus and Cyrus. After briefly narrating Croesus' earlier conquest of Ionia, he tells a story about a visit by Solon, archon of Athens in 594 BCE, to Croesus' court. In Herodotus's account, Croesus has Solon given a tour of his treasury, and then, when he is brought back up to the throne room, Croesus 7 asks, “So, Solon, who is the happiest man in the world, olbiôtaton pantôn?” Herodotus may implicitly be suggesting a cultural misunderstanding here. Olbios as it occurs later in the Histories often has the conventional meaning 8 ‘wealthy, rich in goods’; perhaps Croesus is asking Solon who is the richest man in the world – or perhaps, as Solon's explanatory speech to him suggests, Croesus does not yet see a difference between the idea of riches and the idea of 9 a more generalized good life. Obviously the polite answer to Croesus' question, the response Croesus expects of his guest, is: “Why YOU are clearly olbiôtatos, Croesus the magnificent!” But Solon does not respond to Croesus' tacit signaling and answers honestly: “Tellus the Athenian.” As Solon describes him, Tellus was an Athenian of moderate means, certainly no match for Croesus in splendor, so Croesus is surprised, and he voices the suspicion that Solon is mocking him (1.32.1). Solon, however, proceeds to explain to Croesus that the merely wealthy man (ho mega plousios,1.32.5) is not necessarily happy, and then he dis- 10 closes the difference between genuine happiness and mere wealth. Solon lectures Croesus at some length (1.32): “When you asked me about men and their affairs, you were putting your question to someone who is well aware of how utterly jealous the divine is, and how it is likely to confound us (epistamenon me to theion pan eon phthoneron te kai tarachôdes epeirôtais anthrôpêiôn prêgmatôn peri). Anyone who lives for a long time is bound to see and endure many things he would rather avoid. I place the limit of a man's life at seventy years . No two days bring events which are exactly the same. It follows, Croesus, that human life is entirely a matter of chance (pan esti anthrôpos sumphorê). You see, someone with vast wealth is no better off than someone who lives from day to day, unless good fortune attends him and sees to it that, when he 53 CAROLYN DEWALD dies, he dies well and with all his advantages intact. Plenty of extremely wealthy people are unfortunate, while plenty of people with moderate means are lucky (eutuchês); and someone with great wealth but bad fortune is better off than a lucky man in only two ways, whereas there are many ways in which a lucky man is better off than someone who is rich and unlucky (ho men dê mega plousios, anolbios de). An unlucky rich man is more capable of satisfying his desires and of riding out disaster when it strikes, but a lucky man is better off in the following respects. (H)is good luck protects him, and he also avoids disfigurement and disease, has no experience of catastrophe, and is blessed with fine children and good looks. If, in addition to all this, he dies a good death (ei de pros toutoisi eti teleutêsei ton bion eu), then he is the one you are after – he is the one who deserves to be described as happy (olbios). But until he is dead, you had better refrain from calling him happy (olbion), and just call him fortunate (eutuchea).” The role of the gods in determining human happiness is an issue that at first glance looms large over Solon's speech; it is, after all, the one he begins with. The gods are phthoneroi, jealous, and their jealousy disrupts human lives. But I think that neither Solon nor Herodotus is advancing a metaphysical argument here. Solon is not making an observation about the personality of divinity as much as he is rather reminding Croesus of something all too obvious: we know the gods begrudge human happiness because we see around us the result; very, very few people experience even half the aspects of good fortune that 11 came Tellus' way. 12 Of much more interest to Solon (or certainly to Herodotus' Solon) is the issue Solon concludes with: his own inability to define a human being as happy until he or she has finished being human and is definitely dead, having died ‘a good death’. 13 Solon wants to emphasize the idea of transience and the instability of fortune. On this point he does seem clearly to be Herodotus' mouthpiece, since Herodo- tus as narrator of the whole of the Histories also states, at the conclusion of his proem, “For the things that earlier were great, most of them have become small, and the things that were great in my time were earlier small. Now knowing that human happiness (tên anthrôpêiên eudaimoniên) never remains in the same place I will memorialize both alike” (1.5). At the end of this essay I will revisit the ephemerality of happiness and its relevance to Herodotus' task as a historian; the conviction that human affairs never stay fixed is one of the most important of Herodotus's motivations for writing an account of the great and wonderful deeds of the past and, by doing so, also preserving their memory from becoming worn away by the ravages of time (1.1). But in the context of the Solon/Croesus episode and the narrative of Croesus' later career, more important still is the additional fact that Solon emphasizes: the mutability of everything in ta anthropina is something that the great and powerful men of the text are just as subject to as everyone else.
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