descendants generally.

Nor is this view again without its difficulties: for, after a man has
lived in blessedness to old age and died accordingly, many changes may
befall him in right of his descendants; some of them may be good and
obtain positions in life accordant to their merits, others again quite
the contrary: it is plain too that the descendants may at different
intervals or grades stand in all manner of relations to the ancestors.
Absurd indeed would be the position that even the dead man is to change
about with them and become at one time happy and at another miserable.
Absurd however it is on the other hand that the affairs of the
descendants should in no degree and during no time affect the ancestors.

But we must revert to the point first raised, since the present question
will be easily determined from that.

If then we are to look to the end and then pronounce the man blessed,
not as being so but as having been so at some previous time, surely it
is absurd that when he _is_ happy the truth is not to be asserted of
him, because we are unwilling to pronounce the living happy by reason of
their liability to changes, and because, whereas we have conceived of
happiness as something stable and no way easily changeable, the fact is
that good and bad fortune are constantly circling about the same people:
for it is quite plain, that if we are to depend upon the fortunes of
men, we shall often have to call the same man happy, and a little while
after miserable, thus representing our happy man

"Chameleon-like, and based on rottenness."

Is not this the solution? that to make our sentence dependent on the