“Whom the gods love, die young.”
“Whom the gods love, die young.” I first heard this aphorism as a boy of
ten. I can’t recall whether it was spoken by a family member or by a neighbor
sharing in our grief. It was spoken in reference to my cousin Gerald, who
died at the age of twenty-one. It had been a terrible year, especially for
my mother, who had, just a few months earlier, separated from my father,
then lost her own mother, and now lost a nephew whom she loved as a younger
brother. Gerald was what we call in Yorkshire “a strapping lad.” A strikingly
handsome young man, he was athletic, charming, witty, and compassionate.
My mother loved him not merely for his own Olympian virtues, but also because
he was the embodiment of her own father; the grandfather that I never knew
as he, too, died young. But not quite so young as Gerald, whose sudden death
from a mysterious heart condition cast a pall of gloom over everyone in our
small Yorkshire town who knew and loved him. Most believed in a “God” who
was both loving and just. But, as is so frequently the case when considering
Judeo-Christian theology, it was hard to reconcile notions of God’s “love”
with such seemingly senseless evil as the premature loss of a fine young
man like my cousin Gerald. And so, instinctively perhaps, we invoke the wisdom
and justice of the pagan gods. It makes sense that they would want Gerald
to sit with them on Mount Olympus.
We owe the aphorism “quem di diligunt, adolescens moritur,” to the Roman
playwright Plautus, who flourished around the end of the 3rd century BCE.
But, like many Roman authors, Plautus was invoking and distilling an earlier
Greek idea. This one can be traced to the 5th century historian Herodotus,
who describes the early deaths of two strapping lads, Cleobis and Biton.
The events revolved around a festival of the goddess Hera, which the young
mens’ mother was keen to attend. However, the oxen typically used to draw
her carriage were “not available.” So these stalwart youths put themselves
to the yoke and drew the carriage for “forty-five furlongs to the temple
of Hera,” after which, understandably rather jaded from their strenuous labors,
“they made a most excellent end of their lives.” “And thus,” continues
Herodotus, “the gods showed by these men how it was better for a man to die
than to live.” Therefore, the earlier the death, the better the man.
The sentiment in praise of an early death for the noble and the virtuous
crept into post-Christian, western culture. There are distinct elements
of it expressed by Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” who contemplates his own early
death as “a consummation devoutly to be wished,” though he hesitates under
the sway of the Christian “canon,” which makes it difficult for him to bring
about that “consummation” by his own hand; a knotty theological problem that
did not inhibit the classical Greeks and Romans. But it was the calling of
the classical-inspired Romantic poets of the late 18th and early 19th century
to turn the ancient idea into a cult. We hear it in Wordsworth, who, in
Book I of The Excursion, says “the good die first.” We see it as a lifelong
obsession for Goethe, whose first literary hero “Werther” outdoes “Hamlet”
and commits suicide as a gesture not merely of his sufferings but also of
his virtue. In 1824, fifty years after the publication of The Sufferings
of Young Werther, Goethe reflected on his earlier creation with the bittersweet
meditation:
“I have chosen to stay, you to depart; you went ahead, and did not lose
much. You smile, friend, with deep feeling, as is proper: a gruesome parting
made you famous; we celebrated your wretched misfortune, you left us behind
for weal and woe.”
It’s as if the aged genius - perhaps at that moment in time the most eminent
man in Europe – is envious of his youthful hero for escaping the world so
early, while leaving his creator to relive Werther’s suffering over and
over again.
Without question, it was Lord Byron – the greatest Romantic “hero” – who
gave clearest voice to the idea, linking it most firmly with the ancient
tradition and also reaffirming it as a model and an inspiration for the future,
right up to our own time. Byron’s life was guided by this sentiment, and
his death ensured him the best possible welcome among the gods on Mount Olympus.
In Don Juan, his rambling, satirical and semi-autobiographical epic, he creates
some of his finest poetry to elaborate on the ancient Greek idea:
Happy they,
Thrice fortunate who of that fragile
mould,
The precious porcelain of human clay,
Break with the first fall. They can
ne’er behold
The long year linked with heavy day
on day
And all which must be borne and never
told,
While life’s strange principle will
often lie
Deepest in those who long the most
to die.
‘Whom the gods love, die young’ was
said of yore,
And many deaths do they escape by
this:
The death of friends and that which
slays even more,
The death of friendship, love, youth,
all that is,
Except mere breath. And since the
silent shore
Awaits at last even those whom longest
miss
The old archer’s shafts, perhaps
the early grave,
Which men weep over, may be meant
to save.
(Canto IV, stanzas 11 & 12)
These words may have given some comfort to my mother, to my aunt and uncle,
and to Gerald’s younger brother, though I doubt if anyone in my family would
have embraced them as part of a systematic philosophy of life. But for some,
especially those whose chief motives are aesthetic, Byron’s words speak
to the very core of human existence, “life’s strange principle,” as he calls
it. In his own life and in his poetry, Byron created a powerful model
of a young hero; a natural aristocrat, who is both an artist and a rebel,
all the more so if he dies young. The Byronic Hero flourished throughout
the 19th century, went into a slightly disillusioned quietude during the
first half of the 20th century, but then came back with renewed energy after
World War II. Whether they knew it or not, the rock ‘n roll icons of the
1960s were all inheritors of the Byronic legacy.
I’ve decided to confine my own survey to musicians and writers, in honor
of Apollo, the god of music and poetry. With only a minimum of shuffling,
I’ve come up with an impressive list of fifteen in each category, and I’m
only sorry that I could not come up with more than three women, each one
a writer. All died before they were forty, with one monumental exception,
whose death, just a few weeks after his fortieth birthday, was like “the
death of friendship, love, youth, all that is.”
Contents
Died in
Age
1. Chidiock Tichborne
1586
28
2. Sir Phillip Sydney
1586 32
3. Christopher Marlowe
1593
29
4. George Herbert
1633 39
5. Henry Purcell
1695
36
6. Thomas Chatterton
1770
18
7. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1791 35
8. Robert Burns
1796
36
9. Mary Wollstonecraft
1797
38
10. John Keats
1821 25
11. Percy Bysshe Shelley
1822
29
12. George Gordon Byron
1824
36
13. Jacobo Antonio Arriaga
1826 19
14. Franz
Schubert
1828
31
15. Felix Mendelssohn
1847
38
16. Emily Brontë
1848
30
17. Frederic Chopin
1849
39
18. Arthur Rimbaud
1891
37
19. Wilfred Owen
1918 25
20. George Gershwin
1937
38
21. Charlie Christian
1942
22
22. Dylan Thomas
1953
39
23. Charlie Parker
1955
35
24. Sylvia
Plath
1963
30
25. Brian Jones
1969 27
26. Jimi Hendrix
1970
27
27. Jim Morrison
1971 27
28. John Lennon
1980 40
29. Bob Marley
1981
36
30. Kurt Cobain
1994 27
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