Introduction
to Happiness
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This reading comes from the Cave’s
Happiness—What the Ancient Greeks Thought and Said about Happiness.
As the title indicates, this reading is the introduction to Happiness.
__________
“My brother Gallio, it is the wish of all to live happily. But we’re in the dark when it comes to figuring out what makes for a happy life. … Let us, therefore, determine the goal and the way. And let us find an experienced guide who has explored the region toward which we are advancing.”—Seneca, On the Happy Life
IS IT POSSIBLE TO SEARCH for something if you don’t exactly know what it is you’re searching for? Think about it. And if you found this something, how would you know it was the thing you were searching for if you didn’t already know it in the first place?
This was Meno’s question.
Meno, a well-to-do young man from Thessaly, was a budding philosopher studying with the Greek sophist Gorgias. He raised the question while chatting with Socrates some 2,500 years ago in Athens’ marketplace, the agora.
Picture them. There they are sitting in the shade of an olive tree. Next to them is an old man in a dilapidated stall hawking small amphorae of cheap wine. Meno and Socrates both know that to get a better vintage you have to go a few rows over to the retailers that sell imported Pramnian wine from Lesbos or apple-perfumed wine from Thasos. Opposite them, a young mother is peddling oblong loaves of bread and tall ceramic jars of olive oil sealed with stretched goatskin and twine. Beyond her, countless men, women, and children mill around the agora. Some are Athenian citizens; some are not. Quite a few aren’t even Greek. Then there’s Meno’s entourage, the crowd of slaves that attends and serves him everywhere he goes.
Socrates glances at one of the slaves with curiosity before declaring, “That’s just a debater’s argument, Meno—to ask how you can look for something if you don’t even know what you’re looking for. Did you get that from Gorgias?”
Gorgias was famous for arguing that “nothing is.” This in contrast to Parmenides, who argued that everything simply is.[i]
“Well?” Meno insists.
Even though Meno and Socrates were seeking to understand the nature of aretē, a Greek word with a long and varied history of definitions, including “excellence” and “virtue,”[ii] we might ask the same question about happiness. How can we search for happiness or what it means to be happy if we don’t exactly know what it is to begin with?
Socrates smiles. “We can,” he responds, “because we already know the reality of all things in our souls.”
Our souls, he contends, are immortal and have already experienced all things as they are in themselves. Learning or searching for something, therefore, is actually only recollecting or remembering something we already know, something we’ve already experienced.
It’s an interesting idea. Anyway, don’t we feel that way? We sense we already know what something is, but we struggle to define it with precision―things such as aretē, or friendship and justice, or goodness, truth, and beauty, or, yes, even happiness.
Whatever we may think about Meno’s question or Socrates’ response, it may be useful to have a better understanding of what some people believe about happiness today before we venture into the land of ancient Greek sentiments. Let’s begin by doing what Meno and Socrates couldn’t do since they didn’t have the option. Let’s open a dictionary.
The Dictionary Definition of Happiness
When we crack open a red desk copy of Webster’s New College Dictionary and page over to “happy,” the adjectival form of the noun “happiness,” we find, “Happy: Enjoying, displaying, or characterized by pleasure or joy.”
Okay. Makes some sense, we may think. Pleasure is a very tangible thing. And so, it’s straightforward. On second thought, though, maybe it’s not. Anyhow, what, exactly, is joy?
We look it up. “Joy: Great pleasure or happiness. DELIGHT”—the dictionary’s caps.
There’s pleasure again. But now we’ve got delight.
“Delight: Great pleasure or gratification. joy.”
What? we shrug together. The dictionary is sending us back to joy. But there’s also pleasure again, not to mention gratification.
We’ve now seen pleasure included in definitions for happy, joy, and delight. And even though we thought pleasure was a fairly straightforward thing, there may be something more to it. So, there we go.
“Pleasure: An enjoyable sensation or emotion.” Then, at the definition’s end, we see “DELIGHT.” And we sigh.
One, we can’t help but notice the “joy” part of enjoyable. And the all-caps delight? We’ve already been there.
We go back to joy, imagining we may have missed something. But we haven’t. There’s pleasure—and delight and happiness.
Hold on a second.
We now realize something we should have noticed before in this Choose Your Own Adventure-like dictionary journey to discover what happiness or being happy means. Webster’shas played us for a fool, running us round like a dog wanting a treat tied to its own tail. And so, we end up back where we began—at the word happy or happiness. No matter which word we go with first, we end up returning to happiness. Happiness is apparently defined by … happiness. Yes, the definition involves other words, but it’s a circular definition. And the definitions for other words—joy, delight, pleasure—aren’t really any better.
Apparently, the words happy or happiness are meaningless. On second thought,though, we might simply allow that happy (or happiness) is part of a sense complex tied up with pleasure, joy, and delight, assuming we know what these mean. Whatever the case, we haven’t really arrived anywhere precise.
Fortunately, there’s another way to understand happy or happiness. If we grasp the origins of the word, then perhaps we’ll have a better understanding of what it means. It’s the etymological way.
This seems to be the second approach of Webster’s. Definition two for the word happy: “Marked by good luck: FORTUNATE.” The etymology of the word ultimately derives from the Old Norse word happ, meaning “chance, good luck, fortune.”
Still, however much it denotes something significant about the earliest understanding of happiness, the etymological definition merely gives us the means by which or the how of happiness (luck or fortune) rather than what happiness is or why anyone would want to be happy.
So then, what do we have? Webster’s circular definition of “happy” has left us shrugging our shoulders, and the etymology has only given a partial clue to what being happy means.
Happily, we’re in good company. Many recent philosophers, psychologists, and others have judged it hard to know exactly and precisely what happiness is, not to mention how one gets it or why one would want it.
With this in mind, let’s glance at a few examples of recent thinking about happiness.
Contemporary Ideas about Happiness
We may begin with a very Greek question.[iii] Is happiness one thing, as the Greek thinker Aristotle and others held, or is it many things?
In A Brief History of Happiness, University of California professor of philosophy Nicholas White suggests that happiness does not have one meaning.[iv] Rather, happiness indicates multiple and even conflicting aims a person may have. “A good account of happiness,” he claims, “has to begin with an awareness of the fact of the plurality of aims and conflicts” we humans have. Consequently, whatever happiness is, it is not one thing but many.
Martin Seligman, the godfather of Positive Psychology—a movement in modern psychology that investigates what goes right with human living and flourishing, and how to promote it, rather than what goes wrong—has a similar view to Nicholas White in terms of the manyness of happiness. In Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being, Seligman asserts that happiness or well-being is not one thing but, in the case of his own theory, five major things: positive emotion, engagement, meaning, accomplishment, and positive relationships.[v] As for the term itself, he admits, “I actually detest the word happiness, which is so overused that it has become meaningless.” He suggests that we “dissolve the monism of ‘happiness’ into more workable terms.”
Dr. Seligman has a point. But let’s not despair! Part of what we’re trying to do is understand what people mean by happiness, even if the meaning remains somewhat unclear.
Parenthetically, banishing the word or substituting other terms probably won’t help much with the meaning problem. I recall a colleague recently declaring, “I don’t believe in happiness; I believe in purpose.” She then referenced Oprah to make her case (at which my left brow raised ever so slightly). When I began to probe her understanding of purpose, it was equally ambiguous. So, we may as well stick with happiness―even if we define it with words such as purpose.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article, “Happiness,” there are two basic notions of happiness. One is “‘happiness’ as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing.” The other “uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to ‘depression’ or ‘tranquility.’” As for the first notion, there are three basic theories of well-being or flourishing, which is to say, happiness. They are 1.) Objective list theory (listing items that constitute or add up to happiness); 2.) Hedonism (seeking the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain, or a balance of pleasure over pain―often called utilitarianism); and 3.) Various desire theories (hoping to satisfy present and long-term, or overall, life desires).
To my mind, the neat distinctions posited between these theories, however useful and valid they are in themselves, vanish upon extended reflection. The simple reason is that satisfaction of desire usually involves some measure of pleasure, that is, some positive feeling or sense of well-being, and both satisfaction and pleasure involve a list of things in or by which one finds satisfaction and delight. Viewed in this synthetic way, happiness is as much about a what―a list of things―as it is about the satisfaction-pleasure that arises from having, knowing, or experiencing the list, the whats.
Speaking of lists, let’s turn for a moment to the social psychologist Hadley Cantril. In The Pattern of Human Concerns, his landmark world survey from half a century ago, he catalogs what makes people satisfied or happy.[vi] Topping the list is an “improved or decent standard of living,” followed by the same for one’s children in second place. Next is health. Fourth is a “good job, congenial work,” which implies a concern for a decent standard of living, and that one’s work should be enjoyable or meaningful to some extent. The fifth, sixth, and eighth items on the list describe what people would like to own: a house, land, and, if possible, a business or the means by which they are employed. Seventh is a “happy family life,” and ninth is the “health of [the] family.” The tenth concern is for “happy old age,” which interestingly echoes Odysseus’ concern for happiness in Homer’s Odyssey. These ten give us a decent picture of what people still desire and find happiness in today.
Of course, if an extraterrestrial alien (documented or not) dropped down from another planet to Mother Earth and stood in line at an average supermarket, he-she-it might draw a radically different conclusion regarding what constitutes human concerns and happiness. Picture all those magazine covers you read while patiently waiting in line for your turn to check out. Consider what they promote. Food. Fashion. Gossip. Ways to diet. Super double-t hott people. Who’s zooming whom. Money. Sex―and, ahem, certain how-to recommendations. And on and on. Eventually our alien’s bug-like eyes would glaze over with green alien goo as he-she-it would come to understand that happiness is being or having a list of things that are intended to satisfy desire and bring tremendous pleasure—all things that are, quite frankly, no longer useful to creatures such as the alien is because his-her-its species lives in a non-zero-sum world and procreates in a manner that is, well, out of this world.
Leaving the supermarket behind and our bit of amateur anthropology and ufology, the World Database of Happiness, directed by Ruut Veenhoven from Erasmus University Rotterdam, defines happiness according to the second “purely descriptive psychological term” notion of happiness mentioned by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The database states, “Overall happiness is the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his/her own life-as-a-whole favorably.” Happiness, then, is a subjective phenomenon, what many call subjective well-being. Yet more. The definition tells us that there is no one optimal state of happiness but varying degrees. It also suggests that happiness is not merely something felt but that one is aware of it. The “overall” refers to various criteria of appreciation, including one’s “sensory system, cognition and affect.”[vii] Finally, “favorably” implies positive satisfaction or liking.
The World Happiness Report, edited by Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University and others, similarly measures world happiness in terms of “an individual’s overall evaluation of life” or what may be called “evaluative happiness.” As the report explains it, “Evaluative happiness measures very different dimensions of life.” Things like “higher income, better health of mind and body, a high degree of trust in one’s community … all contribute to high life satisfaction; poverty, ill health, and deep divisions in the community all contribute to low life satisfaction.” The report also specifies the measurement of “the ups and downs of daily emotions” or what is termed “affective happiness,” which “captures the day-to-day joys of friendship, time with family, sex, or the downsides of long work commutes and sessions with one’s boss.”[viii]
Let’s bring this all-too brief and certainly not all-inclusive discussion of recent ideas about happiness to a close with Positive Psychology’s happiness formula, which is H = S + C + I. But what does it signify?
Let’s begin with the H first, which, of course, stands for happiness. According to the formula, H is our long-term, ongoing sense of well-being as opposed to short-term bursts of happiness or unhappiness due to a variety of momentary ups and downs. (There’s that emphasis on life-as-a-whole again versus transient happiness.)
What are the other variables on the other side? We’ll start with the last first. The I is actually the most significant variable in the equation. It’s the variable of growth, of growing happier. The I stands for intentional or voluntary activity, which must be rationally determined, purposefully chosen and willed, and resolutely accomplished. According to Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness, examples include expressing gratitude, developing friendships, learning to meditate, changing the way one habitually thinks, exercising the body, being kind, savoring the small things of life, learning to give, and the list goes on.[ix]The great news is that according to positive psychologists, intentional activity accounts for roughly 40% of our sense of happiness and personal well-being.
Many of us, however, turn to the C of the formula for happiness when, sadly, the Caccounts for only about 10% of our sense of overall well-being. The C stands for the circumstances or conditions of our lives. It mostly answers the what question. We may, for instance, ask the questions, Where am I in life? Where do I live—in sunny Hawaii or cold Alaska? How am I connected to others—am I married or single? What’s my job—is it significant to others or not? What’s in my bank account—am I rich or poor? How do I look—am I attractive to others or not? While changing some of these can lead to a shift in our level of happiness, according to positive psychologists, more often than not the difference is weak and short-term as opposed to the stronger and more long-term change by means of intentional activity.
The S represents our set point, the remainder of our sense of happiness. We may see this as our basic nature. It’s what we return to time and again despite feeling, thinking, and acting differently on occasion. The S is our genetic disposition, our hereditary hand of cards; it’s what we were born with, what was “set” by our parents long ago, the genetic luck we were dealt nine months before we were born. And to that extent, there’s really very little we can do about it after the fact.
Martin Seligman compares our set point for happiness to a thermostat. We might extend his analogy by saying that our natural ability to create happiness is like the heater the thermostat controls. Whatever the outside temperature is (the circumstances of life), no matter how cold and uncomfortable, the heater works to heat a room (our experience of happiness and well-being) to the thermostat’s set point (our inherited sense of well-being). In some cases, this is enough, as when a thermostat is set at a comfortably warm 70° (presuming we like it that warm). In other cases, however, the thermostat is set at a much lower and uncomfortable temperature. In that case, we must further employ the heater—our natural ability to create happiness by means of intentional behavior (the I of the happiness formula)—to become warm (or happy) by sealing drafty windows, wearing warm clothing, lighting a fire, snuggling with a loved one, and the like.
It’s at this point that someone may object that we’ve left out a significant modern view of happiness, the one coming from the standpoint of what many have recently termed “virtue ethics,” though its lineage is ancient. It’s true. And so, we must take a few moments to look at it.
Most of the other views seem to posit happiness as something subjective, meaning that happiness is left to the mercy of each individual. It’s something we can study, sure, but only in a manner that relies on the participants of a study and the accuracy of their own judgments and self-reporting. If a man observes that intentionally drinking diet soda and playing cards all day and every day makes him happy, all that can be done is to acknowledge the self-reported fact and move on to someone else. And so on with any other feeling, thought, or activity.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it may leave a person adrift in the cosmos without any sense of overall meaning as a human being. Accordingly, this last view of happiness, virtue ethics, zeroes in on the question of what it means to be human, acknowledging that there actually is such a meaning.
The meaning itself is usually expressed in what we may term the goal or purpose of life (the Greek term is telos), a purpose that is externally provided by nature itself, the community, or God (the intelligence or rational force behind nature), rather than countless human beings randomly pursuing just as many goals. As such, we do not subjectively create or choose meaning or purpose; rather, we discover it as an objective reality. To live well, then, or to be happy, is the means by which we fulfill this purpose. This “living well” or “happiness” is called “virtue” or “excellence” by this last approach to happiness. Happiness is living well; happiness is virtue (the Greek is aretē). As Aristotle puts it, “Happiness is an activity of the soul that accords with perfect virtue.”[x]
The bottom line: whatever happiness is, whether one thing or many, and whatever the component single or multiple aspects are, happiness is a complex phenomenon. And so, we must ask many questions: Is it something subjective or objective? Does it amount to a list of things? Is it pleasure or the satisfaction of desire? Is it cognitive or affective, neither or both? Where is happiness expressed neurologically? And what about morality? Is happiness related to one’s behavior? To one’s character? Is happiness living well?―a wellness and excellence that applies somehow to every human being? And what about religion? Does happiness have something to do with one’s relation to God (as one religious tradition, for example, declares it—that to be happy is “to know, love and serve God”)? Or is there some other factor we haven’t considered?
Perhaps happiness is theoretically unknowable in any final sense. Like love is. Or the meaning of life may be. Or God. We can know that it is, but not exactly what it is.
Or perhaps we’re just thinking about it too hard or too much. It’s what we may call the problem of the nose. Look at someone’s face. Notice how it all fits together as one harmonious whole—at first glance, anyway. Then look at it again and closer and you may notice something odd―this strange protrusion of triangular, rounded or pointed flesh rising up from the rest of the face. And the protrusion is punctuated with two even stranger holes that lead to who-knows-where. A moment before all was well. You knew what you were looking at and, without thinking about it, the face seemed to fit together harmoniously. Not now! Now it just seems bizarre! (And we secretly wonder if we’re being influenced by that alien we met a moment ago in the supermarket.)
I submit that we are in the position once again to get a first glance at the face of happiness. Forgetting its complexity for a moment, let’s turn to the ancient Greeks who offer us the opportunity to take a fresh look.
The Organization of Happiness
Whatever we may conclude today, the ancient Greeks had their own ideas about the nature of happiness. Beginning with the epic poetry of Homer some 2,700 years ago, many Greeks recorded these ideas—in works of poetry, drama, comedy, history, rhetoric, philosophy, and the like. To name just a few, there were the poets Hesiod, Theognis of Megara, and Pindar; the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon; and the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, not to mention many others up to Plotinus, who wrote a thousand years after Homer.
Given the wealth of testimony relative to our subject, the straightforward goal of Happinessis to present what the Greeks felt, thought, and said about happiness in their own words. Although there are drawbacks to such a presentation, the strength is that the Greeks are able to speak directly to us. What did Odysseus say about happiness? Or the poet Sappho of Lesbos? Or the Athenian law reformer Solon? Or the statesman Pericles of Athens? Or the philosophers Diogenes of Sinope, Pyrrho of Elis, and Zeno of Citium?
Prior to the advent of philosophy, there was no truly systematic thinking among the Greeks about what happiness is. To be sure, it is possible to tease out a system from a particular author or tradition.[xi] Typically, however, we find that the notion of happiness is simply given expression by a character in a poem or play, or in an episode of one of the early histories. A hero, for instance, states the nature of happiness. A farmer prays for it and thereby gives its essential parts. A poet declares the happiness of a victor in the Olympic games based on certain grounds. A ruler asserts his happiness because of what he has. Later on, beginning largely with the investigations of Socrates, the Greeks began to systematically consider what makes for a happy life and how one might be happy.
This shift over time in the Greek approach to happiness explains the basic organization of this book. Mirroring the shift, Happiness is divided into two parts. Part 1, “The What, How, Where & Who of Happiness,” offers a variety of vantage points on happiness, including happiness as a goal; happiness formulas; happiness as the satisfaction of desire; the how of happiness; the problem with happiness; as well as happy times and places; and, finally, happy gods and happy people. Part 2, “Thinking about Happiness—The Philosophers,” offers more systematic Greek thinking about happiness in the form of lively dialogues and expository writing.
I should note that Happiness is not a comprehensive presentation of Greek beliefs about happiness. Instead, it is the most significant of what the Greeks thought and said. This means that some of what the Greeks had to say is left out. To give an example, it would have been preferable to include something extended from Pythagorean thinking. The problem is that little remains from Pythagoras himself. As for later Pythagoreans, we do have several short treatises on happiness and the good life. Unfortunately, though, they have a decidedly un-Pythagorean feel, infused as they are with later philosophical speculation, and so with what is already represented in Happiness.[xii] Consequently, quips are included here and there from the Pythagoreans Archytas, Hippodamus the Thurian, and others, but nothing extensive.
I should also mention another issue, that of terminology. We’ve already seen from Webster’s that joy, delight, and pleasure—not to mention other terms—can stand in as synonyms for happiness. A similar problem arises when selecting for ancient Greek passages having to do with happiness. Is happiness the same as pleasure? Or delight or joy? Or good luck? Or, as many Greeks believed, are the terms good life and happiness equivalent? As we’ll see, one author’s understanding of happiness will cause us to go in one direction—say toward glory, success, and wealth—whereas other authors will turn us in other directions—say toward pleasure or virtue or knowledge of absolute realities.[xiii]
One last point before we launch. Read Happiness in whatever order you wish. If you read it from beginning to end, you will have a strong sense of how Greek feeling, thinking, and speaking about happiness changed over time, from roughly 700 BC to the end of the third century AD. On the other hand, if you wish to read it more meditatively, contemplating ancient Greek reflections on the good life, now from this author and now from another, you may wish to skip around. Either plan will work. (For a few other features of the book, see the “Note” below.)
Let’s Go!
However you read, you’ll likely pick up a new way of looking at happiness. It’s this new way, this new understanding, that is at the heart of Happiness and many other books in the Cave Bonfire Series. Yes, the quest is to learn about history, about what the Greeks thought and said. But more, the goal is the discovery of the earliest light the Greeks have to offer us for a brighter life today. So, in learning something new, we will be learning something old, something that has been tested over time and found valuable.
You may notice that, as the light comes on, some of what the Greeks have to say about happiness is familiar to you. This makes perfect sense. After all, the Greeks are the foundation for western thinking about what it means to live well or happily.
Anyway, let’s go. There’s much to hear and learn, and just as much to practice.
Note - You’ll notice a few common features relative to each chapter in Happiness. First, each one begins with a brief introduction that will serve to orient you to the contents of the chapter, or, if the chapter presents a single thinker, writer, or speaker, to the central facts—or, at least, anecdotes—about that person’s life, works, and ideas. Next, the material coming after the subtitle In their own words presents the thoughts and words of the Greeks from the many works that have come down to us. Interspersed in italics are short commentaries that introduce or explain the content or purpose of the selections and passages that follow.
As for the different voices we’ll encounter, the following is how each will be mentioned in Happiness. Typically, the author of a text is given in italics before offering his or her own words. For example: Sappho of Lesbos Riches mixed together with success bring the highest happiness. (Note: there are no quotation marks since we know these are the poet Sappho’s own words.) That said, if the author is presenting someone else’s thoughts or words, as with Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, or the chorus in Sophocles’ plays, or a politician in Thucydides’ history, then the speaker is noted in parentheses. To give an example: Plato (Socrates is speaking) “The most important thing is not merely to live, but to live well. … He who lives well is blessed and happy.” Lastly, if a whole chapter is devoted to an author, as is sometimes the case in Part 2, or if the author is obvious from the surrounding text, then mention of the author is absent.
So ends this reading. See you in another Cave reading or item.
Notes
[i] To discover what Parmenides had to say—that “What is is”—read his view in the Philosophy Feature in Volume 1 of The Best of Ancient Greek Literature (BAGL) (The Classics Cave, 2025), 70-90.
[ii] To learn more about the ancient Greek conception of aretē, read The Classics Cave’s Aretē: Excellence or Virtue—What the Ancient Greeks Thought and Said about Aretē.
[iii] Early Greek philosophers wanted to know whether reality is one thing or many.
[iv] Nicholas White, A Brief History of Happiness (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 1-5.
[v] Martin Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (New York: Atria Books, 2012), 9-20.
[vi] Hadley Cantril, The Pattern of Human Concerns (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1965).
[vii] This, by the way, is something being actively explored by neurologists—how different affective and cognitive systems in the brain contribute to happiness. See, for example, Morten L. Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge, “Towards a functional neuroanatomy of pleasure and happiness,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13, No. 11. (2009): 479-487.
[viii] John Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs, eds. “World Happiness Report” (Columbia University Earth Institute, 2012).
[ix] Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness(New York: Penguin Press, 2008).
[x] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.13.1 (1102a). To learn more about the ancient Greek conception of aretē, read the Cave’s Aretē: Excellence or Virtue—What the Ancient Greeks Thought and Said about Aretē.
[xi] See, for example, Tim J. Young, A Hero’s Wish: What Homer Believed about Happiness and the Good Life (Sugar Land: EuZōn Media, 2015).
[xii] See, for example, the ethical fragments we have from Archytas (which scholars do not consider genuine), Hippodamus the Thurian, or Euryphamus in The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library, trans. Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie (Yonkers: The Platonist Press, 1919).
[xiii] For Greek terms related to happiness and being happy (for example, eudaimonia, eudaimōn, olbos, olbios, eutuchēs, makar, makarios), see the Glossary.

