Happiness in Herodotus

Abstract

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.