Glossary
Eudaimonia
εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia)
Eudaimonia is the Greek word for the end of a human life, usually rendered “happiness”. Every ancient school used it, and it is read today mostly through Aristotle, for whom it is also the highest good. What the Stoics changed is its content: for them it consists in virtue alone. Marcus Aurelius glosses the word by its parts in Meditations VII, 17, which George Long renders in 1862 as “Eudaemonia [happiness] is a good daemon, or a good thing.” The daimōn, in V, 27, is the guide that Zeus has given to every man, his understanding and reason.
Seneca gives the question a whole dialogue. On a Happy Life, addressed to his brother Gallio, starts from the observation that everyone wants to live happily and few see what makes a life so. In Aubrey Stewart’s 1889 translation, chapter XVI draws the conclusion that it is virtue that makes happiness, and states what virtue asks: to think nothing good or bad that is connected neither with virtue nor with wickedness. The dialogue is written against the Epicurean view that pleasure is the highest good.
Marcus describes such a life in Meditations, V, 34: it can pass in an equable flow of happiness, provided one goes by the right way and holds the good to consist in justice. The image of a smooth flow belongs to the school; ancient summaries of Stoic doctrine attribute to Zeno a definition of happiness as a good flow of life. In the Stoic texts eudaimonia is therefore not a feeling to be pursued but the state of a life ordered by reason, and the sage is the person in whom that state is complete.
In the texts
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations, VII, 17
Eudaemonia [happiness] is a good daemon, or a good thing.
Seneca · On a Happy Life, XVI
Not to think anything bad or good which is connected neither with virtue nor with wickedness: and in the next place, both to endure unmoved the assaults of evil, and, as far as is right, to form a god out of what is good.
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations, V, 34
Thou canst pass thy life in an equable flow of happiness, if thou canst go by the right way, and think and act in the right way.
What the term does not mean
- It is not Aristotle’s eudaimonia. Aristotle allowed that a happy life also needs some external goods; the Stoics denied it, and On a Happy Life, XVI, holds that virtue alone suffices, and more than suffices.
- It is not pleasure or a pleasant mood. Seneca’s dialogue is written against the view that pleasure is the highest good; cheerfulness follows virtue as its companion and is never its aim.
- “Happiness” is a translation, and a loose one. Long keeps the Greek beside the English, “Eudaemonia [happiness]”, and Seneca’s Latin says vita beata, a blessed life.
Related terms
- Stoic sage — ὁ σοφός (ho sophos), lat. sapiens
- Ataraxia — ἀταραξία (ataraxia)
- Apatheia — ἀπάθεια (apatheia)
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