Polytropy

The scholarship is uncertain, but the Greek word ἀρετή, which we translate as virtue, may not be etymologically related to either of

• ἀνήρ, ἀνδρός, he-man;
• Ἄρης, Ἄρεως, the god of war.

However,

• “virtue” is related to the first part of “werewolf,” were being the old English word for a he-man (as wife was the word for a “she-man,” that is, a she-human, a woman; see “Math, Maugham, and Man”; the Wikipedia article “Indo-European vocabulary” currently gives ἱέραξ “hawk, falcon” as sharing the root of “virtue” and were, but Beekes gives a different root, uncertainly);
• ἀνήρ yields the adjective ἀνδρεῖος, α, ον and the abstract noun ἀνδρεία (which like many abstract nouns is feminine), denoting respectively the person who has, and that which is, the virtue that in English is called bravery or courage.

This post is the sequel of the previous one, “Eudemony” (now extensively revised), which was on and of the first book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The present post is on and of the second book, whose theme is moral virtue in general.

I do wonder to what extent Aristotle thinks of ἀρετή as manliness. Homer may have done so in the Iliad, as in one of the passages (Book XV, lines 641–3) cited in the lexicon of Liddell, Scott, and Jones. This concerns a man slain by Hector, namely Periphetes, son of Copreus:

τοῦ γένετ᾽ ἐκ πατρὸς πολὺ χείρονος υἱὸς ἀμείνων
παντοίας ἀρετάς, ἠμὲν πόδας ἠδὲ μάχεσθαι,
καὶ νόον ἐν πρώτοισι Μυκηναίων ἐτέτυκτο.

Of him, a father baser by far, was begotten a son goodlier in all manner of excellence, both in fleetness of foot and in fight, and in mind he was among the first of the men of Mycenae.

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