The Antibody Network ·The Clearing
Reading 3 of 5 The Arithmetic

Call no one happy

The Greeks name the self that refuses the arithmetic, and watch what happens to it.

The reading — Greek tragic tradition: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Homer

Hubris and the Fall

Of all the creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, none is more to be pitied than man. So long as the gods grant him prosperity and his knees move lightly, he thinks he shall never suffer misfortune in time to come. But when the blessed gods bring sorrow upon him, he bears it as he must, with an enduring heart. For the mind of man upon the earth is even such as the day the father of gods and men brings upon him.

— Odysseus, in Homer’s Odyssey, Book 18

Call no man happy until he is dead.

— Solon to Croesus, reported by Herodotus

Greek c. 500 BCE Open this teaching on the Map →
The framing

Call no man happy until he is dead.

Solon says it to Croesus, the richest king alive, who has just asked to be told he is the happiest of men. The Greeks did not have a word for the emptied self. They had a word for its opposite, and they built their theatre around it. Hubris is not arrogance, though that is its symptom. It is the self that has forgotten its scale, that took a run of good days for a change in its own nature, that mistook the role for the one playing it.

Odysseus, in the Homer passage, puts it more gently and more terribly: a man’s mind is even such as the day the father of gods and men brings upon him. We are made of weather. The tragic hero is not destroyed by a jealous god. He is destroyed by refusing the sum the previous two readings laid out, by insisting on remaining full. Read this one as the counter-example. It is what the arithmetic looks like when it is declined.

Carry with you
Where today did you take a good stretch of weather for something you had become?