Arete in its basic sense, means “excellence of any kind”. The term may also mean “moral virtue”. In its earliest appearance in Greek, this notion of excellence was ultimately bound up with the notion of thefulfillment of purpose or function: the act of living up to one’s full potential. In the Homeric poems, Arete is frequently associated with bravery, but more often with effectiveness. The person of Arete is of thehighest effectiveness; they use all their faculties—strength, bravery, and wit—to achieve real results. In the Homeric world, then, Arete involves all of the abilities and potentialities available to humans.In some contexts, Arete is explicitly linked with human knowledge, where the expressions “virtue is knowledge” and “Arete isknowledge” are used interchangeably. The highest human potential is knowledgeand all other human abilities are derived from this central capacity.
