That the emperor had an honest and soldierly satisfaction in his own well-doing is clear; but if he had had anything like the vanity of a Domitian, the senate, ever eager to outrun a ruler's taste for flattery, would never have kept within such moderate bounds.
Pleasure, in Aristotle's view, is not the primary constituent of well-being, but rather an inseparable accident of it; human well-being is essentially well-doing, excellent activity of some kind, whether its aim and end be abstract truth or noble conduct; knowledge and virtue are objects of rational choice apart from the pleasure attending them; still all activities are attended and in a manner perfected by pleasure, which is better and more desirable in proportion to the excellence of the activity.
The most important element, then, of well-being or good life for ordinary men Aristotle holds to consist in well-doing as determined by the notions of the different moral excellences.
My great surprise has been in its well doing to such an extent in the open ground that I have now no fear for it at all, and during the worst frost we have had here during the last twenty or thirty years it was entirely uninjured.
