Do we really need another book on happiness, promising to ‘give the readers a sense of how ancient thinkers approached the topic’ (p. 5)? This edited collection earns its keep by spanning the whole range of ancient thinkers from Homer to Augustine – not just Plato and Aristotle. The editors promise ‘that there is a lot to be learnt today concerning the nature and content of happiness from a proper understanding of the ancient debates’ (p. 5). Many contributors helpfully reflect on the differences between ‘their’ ancient and our prevalent contemporary notion of happiness (succinctly outlined by the editors in their introduction, pp. 2–6). To illustrate, the first two of the (approximately) chronologically ordered chapters emphasise the differences. In ‘On Happiness and Godlikeness before Socrates’ Svavarsson traces how the dependence on the gods for happiness (as in Homer, Hesiod and the early Greek poets) shifts towards defining happiness as emulating the gods – a notion alien to us. Annas, in ‘Plato's Defence of Justice: the Wrong Kind of Reason?’ recommends eudaimonism by defending Plato against Pritchard's charge, renewed by recent commentators, that morality needs no defence – and certainly not Plato's: everyone recognises the special status of doing one's duty. Unlike intuitionists, Annas's Plato requires the virtuous person to be able to give an account of their actions: ‘I do what is just because it is just’ does not succeed in explaining the action, whereas Plato's eudaimonism, justifying justice through happiness, does (pp. 62–5). The topic of justice and happiness continues in the next chapter, Dimas's ‘Wanting to Do What is Just in the Gorgias’, a close analysis of the Gorgias, concluding that Socrates’ defence of justice fails due to insufficiently developed accounts of the soul, justice and happiness.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the scholarly focus on Aristotle's conception of happiness – noted in the editors’ introduction (p. 5) – the volume contains four papers on Aristotle. Only the first of them, R.'s ‘Eudaimonia, Human Nature, and Normativity: Reflections on Aristotle's Project in Nicomachean Ethics Book I’, goes over very familiar ground, reconciling Aristotle's eudaimonism as both naturalistic and rationalistic (p. 89). The last chapter on Aristotle leaves familiar ground because it leaves the topic of virtue and happiness: Grönroos challenges us to explain ‘Why is Aristotle's Vicious Person Miserable?’. Two of the most stimulating chapters explore the role of time in Aristotle's conception of happiness. In ‘Aristotle on Happiness and Long Life’ Lear examines Aristotle's stipulation that happiness requires a complete life. Why do we have to act virtuously over a span of time to count as happy? According to Lear we can identify an action as virtuous only in the wider context of regularly acting in the same way: just as one swallow does not make Spring, so one act of justice does not suffice for acting justly (p. 140). Virtuous action has this feature, Lear suggests, because we have ‘to know ourselves as stably virtuous’ – and the time coming to know ourselves takes spells out the length required for a complete life (p. 143). I wish Lear had elaborated more on the self-knowledge requirement for rational virtue (she only gives the analogy of biological vs ‘real’ motherhood, pp. 142–3). But what happens if you undergo significant changes: a loss of spiritedness which can lead to cowardice, a loss of vitality and the loss of friends due to general grumpiness? Since all these changes come with ageing – does this mean that we lose happiness when we grow old? I am much intrigued by F.'s suggestion in ‘Aristotle on Happiness and Old Age’ that the old remain happy if they become priests, changing from the vita activa to the vita contemplativa (pp. 124–5).
Three chapters, each very different in character, treat the Hellenistic schools. While Dimas seeks to reconstruct an Epicurean axiology in ‘Epicurus on Pleasure, Desire and Friendship’, Ierodiakonou's ‘How Feasible is the Stoic Conception of Eudaimonia?’ seeks to win over those who find Stoicism too paradoxical to take seriously by highlighting recent developments in scholarship, especially the attempt of some to turn Stoicism into a ‘live’ philosophy. Svavarsson's illuminating chapter, ‘The Pyrrhonian Idea of a Good Life’, traces the connection between suspension of belief and happiness as tranquillity from Pyrrho to Sextus. Can a sceptic maintain a connection between the two without giving up scepticism? Only Sextus attributes the hope of becoming tranquil through suspension of belief to both novice and seasoned sceptic. The story of Apelles, then, does not illustrate how one should behave, but rather how the sceptics perceived the connection between suspension and tranquillity in the first place: they observed by chance that casting down your beliefs about value results in tranquillity (pp. 208–10). I still wonder, though, whether the sceptics can harbour such hopes (or beliefs?) about causes without compromising their scepticism.
The remaining chapters deal with later ancient philosophers. Schniewind guides the novice to Plotinus through ‘Plotinus’ Way of Defining “Eudaimonia” in Ennead I 4 [46] 1–3’. Returning to the topic of justice with ‘Why Do We Need Other People to Be Happy? Happiness and Concern for Others in Aspasius and Porphyry’ T. seeks to assuage the familiar complaint against ancient eudaimonism that it cannot really account for justice as an other-regarding attitude. I am not sure, though, whether critics of eudaimonism would be persuaded by Porphyry. Despite admirably including animals and even plants in the scope of justice, he seems ultimately to anchor justice in self-concern: since we eat animals only for pleasure, we thereby upset the order of our rational soul – which bars us from attaining happiness. E.'s ‘On Happiness and Time’ is another gem of the collection. According to Solon and Aristotle time can affect a person's happiness – a thesis which post-Aristotelian philosophers reject. For the Epicureans, happiness as freedom from pain is a limit, while the Stoics, denying that happiness comes in degrees, value one moment of happiness as highly as years of happiness (p. 232). In contrast to the Peripatetics, Plotinus suggests that only the present moment counts when assessing a person's happiness, the past or future are irrelevant. According to his considered view, happiness as a function of intellect is outside of time (p. 236). In a way, Augustine holds a similar view, defining virtue as the love of god which persists through death and resurrection. But if virtue is the same and sufficient (or identical) with happiness ‘on the other side’, why can we not really be happy here (p. 277)? In ‘Happiness in this Life? Augustine on the Principle that Virtue is Self-Sufficient for Happiness’, Tornau answers that the happiness ‘here’ is real but provisional, as we cannot be sure of the purity of our virtue. Indeed, if we were sure, we would be prideful – which is incompatible with virtue. This explains both why our happiness in this life is limited as punishment for original sin, and how happiness comes from God's grace (through love).
Spanning over a thousand years of thinking about happiness, the volume has an ambitious scope. With a mix of expository and more pointed research chapters, the editors succeed in bringing out the differences and developments the conception of happiness has undergone in antiquity. Whether the discussion will inform contemporary research on happiness, as the editors hope, I am not in a position to say – except perhaps that the papers are in principle accessible to non-specialists. Those working on ancient ethics and their students will probably benefit most from two strands of thought apparent in almost every chapter: (a) the sense in which happiness is or is not subjective, and (b) the connection between time and happiness. Especially the latter seems to me to invite further research, and the present volume serves as an excellent starting point.
