Virtuous Words

The source of the English word virtue is Latin virtus derived from vir ’man’, the source also of English virago (‘manlike woman’) and ‘virile’, and so etymologically it denoted ‘manliness’. It passed into English via Old French vertu with the sense of ‘valour, power, strength, moral excellence, goodness, uprightness, skill, efficacy.’ From the sixteenth century it had also come to mean ‘chastity, sexual purity’ in women. The late fourteenth century Wycliffe Bible has virtue where the early seventeenth century King James Version uses power. 

It is revealing here to probe the meaning of the Ancient Greek word arete personified in Arete, the goddess of virtue, excellence, goodness and valour. Usually translated, as ‘virtue’, it was nevertheless not a specifically moral term but was also used to refer to the full realisation of inherent potential, purpose or function, applicable also to animals and inanimate objects. A good bull had the virtue (arete) of being an effective breeder. A good knife could cut well ‘by virtue of’ its sharpness. The term denoted any sort of excellence, distinctive power, strength, capacity, skill or merit, similar to Latin virtus. The Italian word virtuoso preserves the sense of exceptional skill. 

The connotation of ‘excellence’ in the wordarete also comes through in the related word aristokratia, ‘rule by the best people’, from aristos, ‘best of its kind, noblest, bravest, most virtuous.’ Such an ideal should not be equated with its debased realisation in the form of government in which power is held by a hereditary ruling class of ‘aristocrats’ or other privileged ‘elite’ rather than by people of real merit, superlative ability or nobility of character, or, indeed, by people elected or formally chosen in line with the original meaning of the word ‘elite’ from Latin electus, ‘chosen’. 

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