"Of prosperity mortals can never have enough"

Aeschylus names a tension at the heart of the human condition: prosperity rarely satisfies; it expands desire. What begins as a quest for sufficiency becomes a moving horizon. Each attainment revises expectations, shifting “enough” just out of reach. The psychological dynamic is familiar, the hedonic treadmill, yet the tragedian’s formulation carries a moral edge. It is not only that people enjoy abundance; they struggle to stop wanting more of it, and in that struggle character is tested.

Within the Greek tragic imagination, unbounded desire is pleonexia, the will to have “more than one’s share.” From pleonexia grows hubris, a swelling of self beyond proper measure, which summons nemesis. Aeschylus often stages this arc: prosperity breeds confidence, confidence lapses into blindness, and the gods, or the grain of justice within the world, correct the excess. Think of Agamemnon’s triumphant return and the purple tapestries that tempt him to tread where mortals should not, or the Persians, where imperial wealth emboldens a disastrous overreach. The line reads simultaneously as diagnosis and omen: success can become a solvent, dissolving prudence and measure.

The insight resonates now. Consumer economies organize life around perpetual growth, ingenious at converting comfort into craving. Advertising tutors desire; algorithms refine it; supply chains gratify it. Yet the bill arrives elsewhere: frayed attention, social comparison, ecological strain, and widening inequity. Prosperity is good when it secures freedom from fear and want, but it curdles when the pursuit of “more” undermines the conditions of the good, community, time, health, a hospitable planet.

Classical ethics offered a counterweight: sophrosyne, the discipline of measure, and eudaimonia, flourishing through virtue rather than accumulation. Gratitude localizes desire; justice redistributes its fruits; shared purpose redirects ambition from private excess to common wealth. The tragedy Aeschylus intimates is not that abundance exists, but that mortals forget limits. The path to sufficiency runs through remembering them.