Laudator Temporis Acti

Werner Jaeger (1888-1961), Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, tr. Gilbert Highet, Vol. I (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), p. 7, with notes on p. 419:

In Homer, the real mark of the nobleman is his sense of duty. He is judged, and is proud to be judged, by a severe standard. And the nobleman educates others by presenting to them an eternal ideal, to which they have a duty to conform. His sense of duty is aidos. Anyone is free to appeal to aidos; and if it is slighted the slight awakes in others the kindred emotion of nemesis.¹⁵ Both aidos and nemesis are essential parts of Homer's ideal of aristocracy. The nobleman's pride in high race and ancient achievement is partnered by his knowledge that his preeminence can be guaranteed only by the virtues which won it. The aristoi are distinguished by that name from the mass of the common people: and though there are many aristoi, they are always striving with one another for the prize of areté. The Greek nobles believed that the real test of manly virtue was victory in battle — a victory which was not merely the physical conquest of an enemy, but the proof of hard-won areté. This idea is exactly suited by the word aristeia, which was later used for the single-handed adventures of an epic hero.¹⁶ The hero's whole life and effort are a race for the first prize, an unceasing strife for supremacy over his peers. (Hence the eternal delight in poetic accounts of these aristeiai.) In peace-time too, the warriors match their aretai against one another in war-games: in the Iliad we see them in competition even in a brief pause in the war, at the funeral games of Patroclus. It was that chivalrous rivalry which struck out the motto of knighthood¹⁷ throughout the centuries :

αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν καὶ ὑπείροχον ἔμμεναι ἄλλων.

(This motto, which teachers of all ages have quoted to their pupils, modern educational 'levellers' have now, for the first time, abandoned.) Into that one sentence the poet has condensed the whole educational outlook of the nobility.

15. For αἰδώς and νέμεσις, see the book by M. Hoffmann quoted in note 10 [Die ethische Terminologie bei Homer, Hesiod und den alten Elegikern und Iambographen (Tübingen, 1914)], and especially the monograph by C. E. von Erffa, ΑΙΔΩΣ und verwandte Begriffe in ihrer Entwicklung von Homer bis Demokrit (Beihefte zum Philologus, Suppl. Bd. 30, 2), which I advised the author to undertake. Cf. the enlightening remarks of Aristotle on αἰδώς and νέμεσις, Eth. Nic. II, 7, 1108a31 ff., and the more accurate treatment of αἰδώς IV, 15. That of νέμεσις does not exist in our version of the Ethics and may have been lost at the end of Book IV.

16. The Alexandrian grammarians used the word aristeia often, combined with the name of a special hero, as a title of Homeric songs.

17. Iliad vi, 208.