Microsoft developer Web developer Training
		Home page Search this site Contact Us

The Name of our Company - Aretê Systems

The name of our company comes from the ancient Greek word aretê. It is pronounced "r-uh-tay", with the emphasis on the last syllable.

Aretê has no direct English equivalent, but roughly translates as quality, virtue, or excellence.

Robert M. Pirsig popularized the word in his best-selling book of the 1970's, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In that book, the author tells of his personal philosophical search for the meaning of life. His protagonist, whom he calls Phaedrus, investigated various branches of philosophy while a graduate student at the University of Chicago. His research took him through the works of the ancient Greek philosophers, and he discovers that prior to Socrates and Aristotle, Greeks believed in the Homeric ideal of duty to improve oneself, which they called aretê.

Arete, according to the Greek historian H.D.F. Kitto, implies an all-round excellence, and was a dominant value in Greek life for hundreds of years. It is the ideal of the epic poem The Odyssey written by Homer, including its main characters such as the warrior Achilles. Mr. Kitto explains the Greek value of aretê this way:

Their ideal was not a specifically knightly idea, like Chivalry or Love; they called it aretê - another typically Greek word. When we meet it in Plato we translate it 'Virtue' and consequently miss the all the flavour of it. 'Virtue', at least in modern English, is almost entirely a moral word; aretê on the other hand is used indifferently in all the categories and means simply excellence. It may be limited of course by its context; the aretê of a race-horse is speed, of a cart-horse strength. If it used, in a general context, of a man it will connote excellence in the ways in which a man can be excellent - morally, intellectually, physically, practically. Thus the hero of the Odyssey is..in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing aretê". 

The name of our company thus means quality systems.