At the root both of paideuô, “to educate,” and of the corresponding noun paideusis, “education,” the word that Porphyry, the third-century A.D. philosopher, chose to describe the theme of the first four books of the Odyssey, is the Greek word pais. When compounded with other words, pais, which means “child” or sometimes just “boy,” becomes paed- (or ped-), as for instance in such English words as “pedagogy,” “the leading of children into knowledge,” and “pederasty,” “the erotic desire for paides, ‘young boys’ ” (boyhood, for the Greeks, being a state that ended when the first traces of the
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