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by Werner Jaeger (Author), Gilbert Highet (Translator)
Werner Jaeger's classic three-volume work, originally published in 1939, is now available in paperback. Paideia, the shaping of Greek character through a union of civilization, tradition, literature, and philosophy is the basis for Jaeger's evaluation of Hellenic culture.
Volume I describes the foundation, growth, and crisis of Greek culture during the archaic and classical epochs, ending with the collapse of the Athenian empire. The second and third volumes of the work deal with the intellectual history of ancient Greece in the Age of Plato, the 4th century B.C.--the age in which Greece lost everything that is valued in this world--state, power, liberty--but still clung to the concept of paideia. As its last great poet, Menander summarized the primary role of this ideal in Greek culture when he said: "The possession which no one can take away from man is paideia."
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Werner Jaeger's acclaimed three-volume work treats PAIDEIA, the shaping of Greek character, as the basis for a study of Hellenism as a whole, to explain the interaction between the historical process by which Greek character was formed and the intellectual process by which they constructed their ideal of the human personality. This first volume describes the flowering of Greek culture during the archaic and classical epochs that preceded the fall of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian Wars, at the beginning of the fourth century B.C.
