Virescit

Aristotle called virtue a hexis — not a feeling, not a single act, but a settled disposition grown by the steady repetition of right action, the way a seedling becomes a cypress only by years of turning toward the light. The Stoics after him spoke of the soul as a plot of ground to be tended: cleared of what chokes it, watered by discipline, left to the slow work of time. This is a small plot of ground for that older way of thinking — essays on courage, temperance, justice, and prudence, read through the writers of Athens and Rome, for anyone who suspects that character, like a tree, cannot be willed into being all at once, only planted, and grown.