On A Happy Life: What Does It Actually Mean to Live Well? The Stoic Blueprint to Rethinking Happiness as a Life of Virtue, Desire, and the Examined Life (De Vita Beata)

Can happiness be built, or does it only arrive by chance?

Seneca takes up what he calls the question everyone rushes toward without stopping to think about: what is a happy life, and how is one actually achieved? Addressed to his elder brother Gallio, this is the Stoic legend at his most ambitious and most nakedly human.
De Vita Beata was composed when Seneca was in his early sixties, still formally at the centre of imperial power as Nero's chief advisor, but with the political ground already...