called the island he makaria (the feminine form of the adjective makarios). They used a similar word when speaking of their gods, whom they believed to be free from moral restraints and human restrictions and unaffected by poverty or weakness. They also used it as a synonym of ‘dead’, the idea here being that only when they were dead could people fully and finally escape from the woes of this world. The Greeks had a different word for what we call ‘happiness’, but as its literal meaning was ‘under