Learning to Look at Death with Herodotus
I first read the story of Croesus as a college freshman. Croesus, king of Lydia and wealthy beyond all imagining — the Donald Trump or Bill Gates of the Archaic age — is baffled that Solon, famous wise man and Athenian exile, refuses to name him as one of the world’s most fortunate men. Solon gives two examples of really fortunate men: young men who die in their sleep after a life of service to the gods, and an old man who lives long enough to be a grandfather and dies nobly in battle. Croesus is skeptical, so Solon tries to explain his criteria by sharing that most Greek idea about death:
If, besides these things, he still ends his life well, then this is the one that you are looking for (i.e., the fortunate man), and he is worthy to be called blessed (olbios): but before he has died, hold off. Don’t call him blessed; call him lucky (eutuchēs) (1.32.7)
At eighteen we are lovers of moral tales. We are idealistic and believe deeply in the value of human goodness over material wealth. I was certainly such a lover and believer. I took away from this story a sort of obvious, quasi-Christian dictum that was intelligible to a young, unsophisticated student: that wealth and power matter less than living a good life.
Closer examination of Solon’s lesson shows that this is a tale about mortality in all its aspects — the fragility of life at any stage, the precariousness of human well-being and happiness, the impact one terrible event might have. Solon takes care never to deny the value of Croesus’ wealth — who could deny, especially in the hardscrabble world of the 7th century BCE, that having access to money and means could dramatically alter your life for the better?
Rereading this passage, as I do every so often (more as I age myself), I am struck by Solon’s obsession with calculations. Not only does he lecture Croesus on who is better off — the man who is moderately lucky is better off than a really lucky man who then falls into misfortune — he also counts out the average number of days for a human life. Solon gives the average person seventy years, or 26,250 days. And yet, he says, you can’t count on any of these days being the same, bringing what you predicted it would. The next day, and the day after that, and the day after that — all are uncertain and unstable. If your life has been pretty good, and your death is pretty good — well, then, we can call you blessed.
The Greek word Herodotus uses for ‘blessed’, olbios (ὄλβιος), isn’t easy to translate. As with many adjectives that convey a positive quality, how do you separate out goodness from happiness from good fortune from divine favor?
One finds olbios used in early texts such as Homer’s Odyssey and Hesiod’s Works and Days, which are so concerned with getting by, to describe people who have are blessed often because they possess wealth (e.g., Odyssey 17.420, W&D 826). This meaning is even, in Homeric verse, extended to signify possessions themselves. So, for example, a hero might ask the gods to grant his host olbia so that he doesn’t regret bestowing on you an extremely valuable sword (Odyssey 8.413). This notion of ta olbia, blessings, to mean fabulous material wealth persists into the classical period, so that even Herodotus himself uses it to describe a wealthy person (8.75).
Yet, there is a second and related meaning, one that is apparent in our passage from Herodotus, where olbios can refer more generally to someone who is happy and blessed, where that notion is distinct from having personal property. The examples that Solon cites in his conversation with Croesus offer a sharp contrast to the millionaire king — men of limited financial means who nevertheless enjoy the status of “blessed.”
Parsing out olbios in this way may not add much to our understanding of Solon’s pronouncement, because when reading the Greek (or even a translation) you get a feel for the distinction that Herodotus is trying to make. Some people are dealt a good hand — sometimes for a long time, sometimes for a lifetime. And those who get the lifetime reward, or get the reward at the end, where their fortune gets better the longer they move toward the 26,250th day — these are olbioi. Moreover, Solon realizes nobody has it all:
It’s impossible for a person to have all of these benefits, just as no country is self-sufficient, providing for all its own needs, but one country has what another lacks: the one that has the most benefits is the best. So too no one human body is self-supporting: what one has is lacking in another. And the one who ends up having the most benefits and then ends his life agreeably, to my mind this one, King, deserves to bear this name (ὄλβιος). (1.32.8–9)
In this sense, olbios isn’t an unqualified positive; it’s just the best you can do, recognizing that no life is perfect, no life is without lack.
My father died after 30,378 days on this planet, which to Solon would probably seem a pretty good run. I have been struggling with the fact of his death now for 614 days — not much, perhaps by Solon’s reckoning, but a small lifetime for me. In those 614 days I have had much to struggle with, but what I struggle most with is his end.
His beginning and middle were not, maybe, the stuff of epic, but I think you could at the least call him eutuchēs. He was born during the Depression to parents who loved him and raised him the best they could. He had food and shelter. He was able to go to college on the G.I. bill after the Korean War and was fairly consistently employed. He married and had two children, had strong friendships, acquired enough material wealth to be comfortable, lived to see a grandchild born.
This is not to say that there were not lucky days followed by the unlucky. Solon was right about that in his case too. His mother was a rather cold and distant woman, and I’m not convinced she ever really wanted a child (she chose not to have any more). His father died when he was 21 years old, leaving a visible hole in his life — its visibility all the more remarkable for what a quiet, reticent person my father was. The recession of the 1980s left him unemployed in our rust-belt town on-and-off for several years, which I think was hard for him, when his identity was so wrapped up in being a person who did practical tangible things. And then there was the illness of the last year and a half of his life, which he felt constantly and knew he was powerless to alter. In those moments I think he felt anything but lucky.
I say “I think,” because if there is one thing I know for certain, it is that my father was the last person on earth to talk about the lack in his own life. You could call it a symptom of his generation or temperament, but of the many things I don’t know about him, the biggest is what he missed or regretted. Solon tells us these exist for us all — no one has it all, no one is self-sufficient. What did he miss most? What kept his life from being eutuchēs in its every facet?
I regret this lack, but it does not torment me. I am, after all, my father’s daughter, and so my own regrets and little griefs, my own lacks — well, these are likely to follow me to my grave in the same way my father’s followed him. What torments me is his end.
How do we mark the end? What precisely does Solon mean? My father began suffering a series of little strokes that gradually impaired all his functions, and as so often happens, one medical procedure led inevitably to another, each weakening him further. One end is that slow and steady diminishment. This was a particular kind of grief because he and we could chart the way in which he became less than himself. I remember one day, sitting with him at the DMV perhaps seven months before he died. “This is terrible,” he said. “The DMV?” “No, getting old is terrible.” I knew what he meant. He had already been old for many years by Solon’s reckoning, but he now felt incapacitated. His daughter had to drive him to the DMV. He had to use a cane to walk around. His words came haltingly. That was his “old,” and I knew that though he rarely complained, he did not perceive it to be a good end.
Another kind of end is that final moment of life, when the breath stops and the heart ceases to beat. For Solon the men who died olbioi had an end that did not look like an end. Cleobis and Biton go to sleep, never to awaken. Tellus, an old man, dies in battle, still strong and vital. My father did not fall asleep never to awaken, or die an old man in a vital body. He awoke in the early morning, gasping for breath, and unable to get enough oxygen into his system, died. The nurse on duty called me, but I could not get to his bedside before he passed from living to dead. He died with a nurse, a caring but virtual stranger, by his side, in a room that had been a facsimile of a home for him the past three months. If what I truly wanted for my father was immortality, my next best hope was a Solonic death.
How do we measure good fortune? I struggle over and over with the reality of my desires, in which I read my father’s death as my own failure — my inability to be there at his bedside, to keep him in his home for the last months of his life, to comfort him. But it was not, after all, my death. It was his. And this part of life is as chancy and unpredictable as the beginning and middle. If I find it difficult to remove my own sense of culpability for the story of his end, I also find more comfort in Solon’s words than I have in nearly any other’s.
The lack in my father’s life was inevitable, as it is for us all, and he chanced upon a bad end. Not perhaps the worst end — for Solon’s message, it seems to me, formulated with its harsh Archaic accent, is that most of us are going to have bad ends. Who really falls asleep at the peak of one’s powers, never to awaken again? Who lives into old age just as strong and fit as he was thirty years prior? Whose last moments are filled with bliss and love and ease? There are few good deaths.
So we tally up the days, calculate the pluses and minuses, size up the benefits and deficits. My father’s end wasn’t beautiful or agreeable, and though he had on balance a pretty good life, I don’t think Solon would call him olbios. Yet, it is perhaps the rarity of such a death that offers me some relief. He had 30,378 days, most of them good. It is enough. It has to be.
Elizabeth Manwell is an obsessive maker of jams and pickles, fascinated by honeybees, and Associate Professor of Classics at Kalamazoo College.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.
