The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2 (of 6)

Chapter 89: CHAP. 47. (46.)—MEN WHOM THE GODS HAVE PRONOUNCED TO BE THE MOST HAPPY.

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The volume assembles an encyclopedic survey of the known world and its living inhabitants, moving from detailed regional geography and descriptions of seas, rivers, islands, and peoples to extended treatments of humanity, its generation, anatomy, and the origins and inventions of arts. Subsequent books catalog terrestrial animals—their habits, capture, and uses—followed by comprehensive observations on fish and marine creatures, their sizes and behaviors. Accounts mix naturalistic description, reported marvels, medicinal uses derived from animals, and travel and secondhand reports, organized as topical chapters intended as a practical compendium of natural and human phenomena.

CHAP. 47. (46.)—MEN WHOM THE GODS HAVE PRONOUNCED TO BE THE MOST HAPPY.

In reference to this point, two oracles of Delphi may come under our consideration, which would appear to have been pronounced as though in order to chastise the vanity of man. These oracles were the following: by the first, Pedius was pronounced to be the most happy of men, who had just before fallen in defence of his country.1255 On the second occasion, when it had been consulted by Gyges, at that time the most powerful king in the world, it declared that Aglaüs of Psophis 1256 was a more happy man than himself.1257 This Aglaüs was an old man, who lived in a poor petty nook of Arcadia, and cultivated a small farm, though quite sufficient for the supply of his yearly wants;1258 he had never so much as left it, and, as was quite evident from his mode of living, his desires being of the most limited kind, he had experienced but an extremely small share of the miseries of life.