Life & Wisdom Quote by Sophocles

Health, for Sophocles, is a category error when you strip it of material reality. The line snaps at the comfortable habit of treating “free from disease” as a purely bodily status, a clean medical verdict. He drags the conversation back to the older Greek sense of disease as a kind of disorder in the whole life: the body can be intact, but poverty makes existence itself pathological - chronic strain, exposure, dependence, humiliation. “Constantly sick” isn’t metaphorical flourish so much as an indictment of a society that calls a man well while keeping him one missed meal from collapse.

The intent is double-edged. It rebukes moralizing praise - the sort of civic rhetoric that congratulates the fortunate on their “health” as if it were a virtue or an achievement. It also quietly widens the definition of harm: if poverty is a continuous ailment, then charity is not enough; the condition is structural, recurring, and socially produced.

In Sophocles’ dramatic world, suffering is rarely random. Fate, the city, the family line - systems bigger than any one person - grind the individual down. Read in that context, poverty becomes another inexorable power, less theatrical than a curse but just as total. The subtext is almost modern in its clarity: you can’t separate medicine from economics, or personal well-being from civic arrangements. Praising “health” without naming poverty is just another way of blessing the winners and calling it wisdom.