Aréte In Ancient Greece

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Aréte is reaching the best of your abilities, the Greeks did it in ways like athletics and art and in modern society we do with things like architecture (Hooker).
The Ancient Greeks strived for Aréte in many different ways. One of the ways was athletics. Competitions were held at Delphi, Nemea, and Isthmia. Those were more of the big competitions. The more local competitions, like the Panathenaic games held in Athens. If you won a competition, you did not get a prize. instead you brought upon honor to yourself, your family, and the place you came from (even though only Greek were able to participate). Even though you did not get a prize, you could get a statue sculpted for you, or poems about you winning, also
Greek athletics were not really …show more content…

They trained for these competitions. This is an example of Aréte because they were trying to reach perfection and get to their full potential by winning these competitions.
Another example of Aréte in Ancient Greece is art. The Ancient Greeks did many things with art. A few examples are pottery and sculpting. They gifted little creations to Gods and Goddess, buried them with dead people and also gave them to their children to use as toys. They also used clay pots, jars and vases for almost everything. They used them kind of like cave paintings, they painted scenes on the pottery. Most things that we have learned about the Ancient Greeks have come from their clay creations that have lasted for a very long time.
The Ancient Greeks had many famous sculptures. People like Pheidias, Polykleitos, Praxiteles, Skopas and Lysippos are the people who figured out how to really make their sculptures of humans, really look like humans (History.com Staff). In the Archaic period, statues were never meant to look like certain individuals. They were meant to look like the ideal person with beauty, piety, honor or sacrifice. They were always young men, and never women. They were ranging from childhood to the teenage years of a young man. In the classical era, they used statutes in buildings, mostly to fill the triangular fields of the pediments. They did not always create them for that though. For example, the parthenon in Athens, a statue of the Goddess …show more content…

That is also an example of Aréte because they wanted to make their work come out that way and for them to be that way (Greek Art).
The Ancient Greeks were not the only people in the world who trying to have Aréte. People in the modern society have Aréte or strive for Aréte, and most of the time they don’t even know that, that was what they are doing.
An example of Aréte in our modern society is Architecture. The city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is known for their architecture. Dubai is home to the world's highest skyscrapers. One of the most famous buildings there is the Burj Khalifa. It is the tallest artificial structure in the world. It stands at a whopping 2,722 feet tall to the tip of the building. This building took six years to finish. There are tons of great examples of architecture in Dubai, the Burj Khalifa only being one of them.
Dubai is not the only place in our modern society that has great architecture and an example of Aréte. There are tons of places in the United States that have that. For an example, the Golden Gate Bridge. The Golden Gate Bridge is in San Francisco, California. The height of this bridge is 746 feet high, while the length is 8,980 feet long. The bridge was built by Michael M.

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