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 roughly the same in every nation—it is both moral and practical. It consists partly...