DELUSION, CLARITY AND MISFORTUNE | February 14th 2008

ToastyKen/Flickr

A.P. David considers the tragedy of Adrastus. The "son of the mythical knot, grandson of the golden touch", his life was a total bummer. Was this chance? Fate? An essential consequence of character? (See David's other readings of Herodotus here, here and here) ...

In response to my recent piece about Herodotus and the verdict of history, someone wrote: "when Solon says, 'man is entirely what befalls him...one must look always at the end of everything--how it will come out finally'--the "it" there, is still some essential story, some personal myth that comes gallumphing [sic] through the chaos."

He continues, speculating about the celebrated "end" of Socrates: "... is it something personal that we don't know about, a sorrow he hid, a problem in the face of which he gave up?"

I think there is some insight here into the story that immediately follows in Herodotus's narrative, about Adrastus, the ill-starred guest-friend of Croesus, and Atys, Croesus's own son. The story is once again filled with what we moderns have come to call "fairy-tale" elements. (It is endlessly fascinating to wonder what the source of these all-too-human motifs might have been. That such motifs are familiar to us, and yet drawn independently of ancient Herodotus and the stories he knew, can lead to the grandest speculation about our supra-historical nature. I shall try not to indulge it here.)

Atys was an up-and-coming, strapping fellow, a captain of the Lydians and surely a king in the making. But his father had a dream that he would be killed by a spearpoint. It is like the fearful pin of "Sleeping Beauty", except that the child is a man--and so the sexual connotation is not as transparent. (Although Croesus does marry the boy off as a result--and the pin becomes a masculine weapon.) But just as in "Sleeping Beauty", all the sharp armaments are cleared from the halls and stored away, lest one should fall on him and fulfil the dream-omen. Somehow we all know that attempts to thwart a prophecy, however clever they may be, end up fulfilling it. How do we know this?

Adrastus was "the son of Gordias, the son of Midas"--a son of the mythical knot and grandson of the golden touch. After involuntarily killing his brother, he was expelled from Phrygia by his father. Adrastus then sought protection and ritual purification in the house of Croesus, a family friend. It was customary, but also decent, for Croesus to welcome such a polluted chap. Adrastus was duly purified and became a member of the court.

The story has that quality that at each stage we say, "Stop--don't do it!" Yet what is being done is consistently the only decent thing to do.

The vassal Mysians come to court, complaining that "the greatest brute of a wild boar" (tr. Grene, in Greek, charmingly, a "great thing of a pig") has descended from their local Olympus to ravage their fields. They come soliciting a hunting band headed by Croesus's son, the doomed Atys, to tackle the animal. Croesus at first refuses, but of course he yields to his son's impeccable logic:

What hands has a boar? Where is the iron spearpoint you fear? Now, if the dream had said I should die by a tooth or anything else that fits this beast, you might well do what you are doing. But no, it was a spearpoint. Since, then, our fight is not with men, let me go.

Croesus agrees, and sends poor Adrastus to mind his son on the hunt. Adrastus owes Croesus this, and many another a service, but he is mindful enough to say: "It is not fit that someone loaded with such a calamity as mine should go among his fellows who are fortunate." Of course Adrastus launches a spear at the boar, and kills Atys instead.

When Adrastus presents himself to the distraught Croesus, trailing in the train that is carrying the corpse of the slain son, he offers his neck to be cut over the body. But Croesus pities him, feeling that Adrastus's self-condemnation is enough. The funeral takes place.

But Adrastus, the son of Gordias, the son of Midas, he who was the slayer of his own brother and had become the slayer of his purifier, who was, moreover, aware within himself that he was of all men he had ever known the heaviest-stricken by calamity, when there was a silence about the tomb and none was there, cut his throat over the grave.

Perhaps Solon's admonition, "look to the end", best applies to those who are wont to confuse the extravagant external with an internal worth. Surely those who count themselves blessed are not completely aware of their situation. Croesus thought he was the most blessed of all, given his wealth and importance, yet he was deluded and delusional. But when Adrastus "knows within himself" that he was "the heaviest-stricken with calamity", he was smitten with perfect clarity and self-knowledge. Alas, those who think they're God's gift often have misfortune coming to them, but depressed people usually have good reason to be so. Adrastus shows us that there can be a piercingly specific, terribly non-delusional, and altogether internal clarity about one's random and yet genuine misfortune.

(A.P. David is the author of "The Dance of the Muses".)