Odyssey - Werner Jaeger (essay date 1934)

Werner Jaeger (essay date 1934)

SOURCE: "Nobility and Areté," in Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Vol. I, second edition, translated by Gilbert Highet, Oxford University Press, Inc., 1945, pp. 3-14.

[Jaeger was a German educator and classics scholar whose works include Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development(1934) and Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture(1939-44). In the following excerpt from the latter work, originally published in German in 1934 under the title Paideia: Die Formung des Griechischen Menschen,Jaeger examines the Iliad and the Odyssey as examples of the early Greek aristocratic culture, noting the embodiment of those ideals in the poems'heroes.]

Education is such a natural and universal function of society that many generations accept and transmit it without question or discussion: thus the first mention of it in literature is relatively late. Its content is...

[The entire page is 4809 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass