Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a tract from the Enneads listed 46th in the chronological order and entitled EGGa~~oviaq. Many critics have translated this as "Happiness', but as I shall make clear, eudaimonia is not equivalent to happiness. Neither is it equivalent to 'well-being', 'Gluckseligkeit', 'bonheur' or any such unqualified term. A more recent attempt to translate it comes from Ciapalo who calls it: 'the good state of one's inner reality' and equates it with the attainment of the One by those beings who live superabundantly. As we shall see, this is much closer to what Plotinus has in mind and since a single term does not suffice I shall transliterate rather than transIate the term and hope that by the end of this paper the content of eudaimonia will have been made clear.