thought — or whether the man must indeed be of a certain character, but it is even more necessary that his acts should be of a certain character.
Now if we make a division of the kinds of life, some do not even pretend to this sort of well-being, being only pursued for the sake of what is necessary, e. g. those concerned with vulgar arts, or with commercial or servile occupations — by vulgar I mean arts pursued only with a view to reputa- tion, by servile those which are sedentary and wage-earning, by commercial those connected with buying in markets[1] and huckstering in shops. But there are also three goods directed to a happy employment of life, those which we have above[2] called the three greatest of human goods, virtue, prudence, and pleasure. We thus see that there are
three lives which all those choose who have power, viz. the lives of 'the political man', the philosopher, the voluptuary; for of these the philosopher intends to occupy himself with prudence and contemplation of truth, the ' political man ' with noble acts (i. e. those springing from virtue), the volup- tuary with bodily pleasures. Therefore the latter calls a[3] different person happy, as was indeed said before.[4] Anaxagoras of Clazomenae being asked, 'Who was the happiest of men?' answered, 'None of those you sup- pose, but one who would appear a strange being to you,' because he saw that the questioner thought it impos- sible for one not great and beautiful or rich to deserve the epithet 'happy', while he himself perhaps thought that the man who lived painlessly and pure of injustice or else engaged in some divine contemplation was really, as far as a man may be, blessed.
5
About many other things it is difficult to judge well, but most difficult about that on which judgement seems to all easiest and the knowledge of it in the power of any man — viz. what of all that is found in living is desirable, and what, if
26-121 s^J ij^ = E.N. 1095^ 14-1096* 10.
