When I was an adolescent, I conceived a desire to know “the definition of happiness.” This was all I wanted, when a friend asked what to give me for my birthday. He took me seriously, but unfortunately I could not take his answer seriously, because what he came up with was, “A puppy.” This friend did not understand that
- an epitome was not a definition;
- I was a cat person.
Would I have been happier with Aristotle’s definition, whereby happiness is “a certain sort of activity of soul in accord with virtue”? This comes in Book I the Nicomachean Ethics. The bulk of the present post is the Greek text of that book, marked up and annotated.