Daily Inspiration Quote by Aeschylus

Luck, for Aeschylus, is never a glittering personality trait; it is a verdict delivered at the end. "We must pronounce him fortunate who has ended his life in fair prosperity" treats happiness like a final accounting, not a mood. The line carries the hard Greek idea that a life can only be judged whole once it is closed, because the gods, fate, and political upheaval all have the ugly habit of arriving late.

Aeschylus writes from a world where reversal is not a plot twist but a moral law. In his tragedies, a man can be exemplary at noon and ruined by dusk: a battlefield triumph metastasizes into civic arrogance; a family legacy curdles into inherited bloodshed. "Pronounce" matters here. Fortune is public, communal language, a civic pronouncement made by survivors who have watched too many celebrated figures collapse. It's less self-help than jury duty.

The subtext is a warning aimed at spectators tempted to admire power in real time. Don't crown the victor too early; don't confuse a good season with a good life. Fair prosperity is modestly phrased, almost cautious, as if to avoid provoking the cosmic jealousy that haunts Greek moral imagination. The sentence also smuggles in a political ethic: stability is not just personal comfort but a kind of social peace, the rare condition in which one dies without dragging the city into one's reckoning.

Aeschylus isn't romanticizing the grave. He's arguing that fortune is fragile, and praise should be rationed accordingly.