Book 1
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.
9
But perhaps it is quite wrong to be guided in our judgement by the changes of fortune, since true prosperity and adversity do not depend on fortune’s favours, although, as we said, our life does require these in addition; but it is the active exercise of our faculties in conformity with virtue that causes happiness, and the opposite activities its opposite.
