Opening Pandora's Box: Phrases We Borrowed From the Classics and the Stories Behind Them

Greece.

The Phrases

An Academy

An institution of higher learning or culture

The world’s first academy was founded in Athens at the beginning of the fourth century BC by the philosopher Plato, perhaps one of the greatest and most influential thinkers of ancient Greece. It started as a simple association of like-minded intellectuals which was named after its meeting place near the grove of the hero Academus on the outskirts of the city.

Through the Academy, Plato taught young Athenian aristocrats (including the equally influential philosopher Aristotle) the arts of philosophy, geometry and mathematics. Even after Plato’s death, the Academy continued as a centre of learning, developing ideas which would become the foundation of Western philosophy and which would have a profound influence on the development of Christian ideology hundreds of years later.

In modern English, the word ‘academic’ has come to imply ‘out of touch’, ‘pointless’ or ‘obscure’. This of course is terribly unfair on the original Academics, whose philosophies lie at the very heart of later Western thought.

Achilles Heel

A person’s weak spot or vulnerability

Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!

Homer, Iliad, i.1–2, trans. Alexander Pope 

The story of Achilles is central to the plot of the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem of the Trojan War and Greek literature’s earliest and perhaps finest work. The poem tells what happens when Achilles quarrels with Agamemnon, his commander-in-chief, and withdraws from the fighting around Troy.

Deprived of their best fighter, the Greek army is pushed back by the Trojans until Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus enters the battle wearing the hero’s famous armour. The Trojans, thinking that Achilles has returned, begin to flee, but the Trojan hero Hector kills Patroclus and stems the tide. Devastated by his friend’s death, Achilles vows revenge and defeats the unfortunate Hector under the walls of Troy.

At this point, the Iliad ends, but Achilles became such a huge figure in the Greek world that later writers (like modern fans who write home-made sequels to The Lord of the Rings) kept adding to the mythology around him. It was the Roman poet Statius who introduced the story that the baby Achilles had been dipped in the River Styx. This, Statius wrote, made him invulnerable except at the heel by which his mother had held him.

In Statius’ version, Achilles is finally killed by a poisoned arrow that strikes the vulnerable spot, and ever since, any fatal weakness has been called an ‘Achilles heel’.

An Adonis

An incredibly handsome man

Adonis is one of mythology’s more mysterious figures. The ancient Greek writers can’t even agree who his father was, and generally treat him as only semi-divine. On the other hand, Adonis has a long history as an object of cult worship, with deep roots in Near Eastern religion: he has strong similarities with the powerful Egyptian god Osiris, and his name comes from the same root as the Hebrew Adonai – one of the names of the God of the Old Testament.

The sources do agree, though, that Adonis was extraordinarily good-looking. At one point he had two of Greece’s most powerful goddesses – Aphrodite the goddess of love and Persephone the queen of the Underworld – competing for his affection. The goddesses were so smitten by the young demigod that in the end Zeus had to step in, dividing Adonis’ time equally between the two.

This exhausting arrangement was not to last. One day, when Adonis was hunting, an angry god – some say it was a jealous Ares, others that it was Artemis or Apollo – took the form of a monstrous wild boar and mortally wounded him. Aphrodite, heartbroken, watched Adonis die in her arms.

As a religious figure, Adonis was remembered in secret ceremonies attended only by women, who would plant sacred seeds and lament his untimely death.

To be Under the Aegis

To be under someone’s protection or authority

In Greek mythology, the aegis was a very mysterious garment associated with Zeus and his daughter Athena. Sometimes the aegis is represented as a sort of cloak. At other times, it is a shield or a fringed breastplate. Some accounts have it made out of goatskin (perhaps the skin of the magical she-goat Amalthea) while others claim it was made of gold. In Athena’s hands, the aegis is sometimes a mantle woven out of hissing snakes.

At any rate, the aegis was believed to be a tool of incredible power. Zeus could bring down thunderstorms and strike terror into mortals just by shaking it, and Athena wore it in battle in order to terrify her enemies. Set on the front of the aegis was the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa, which was so horrible to look at that anyone who saw it turned to stone.

To be covered by the aegis of the gods was to have some friends in seriously high places, and that sense of protection, coupled with high authority, survives today.

Aeolian Harp

A musical instrument designed to be played by the wind

The Aeolian harp, invented in Germany in the seventeenth century, is an instrument in which strings are made to vibrate by the movement of the air, without any human interference. It is named after Aeolus, an ambiguous figure from Greek mythology who was thought to be the master of the four winds.

He appears most famously in a story of the hero Odysseus, who is said to have arrived at a mysterious floating island on his way back from Troy. This was Aeolia, the island where Aeolus reigned along with his six sons and six daughters (who were, disturbingly, all married to each other).

Strange domestic arrangements notwithstanding, Aeolus entertained the hero kindly, and gave him a gift to help him on his way home: a magical bag in which all the winds were trapped, fastened with a silver string. By only letting out the favourable West Wind, Odysseus was able to make swift progress, and before long, the shores of his beloved homeland were in sight.

But some of Odysseus’ men, greedy for loot, decided to see what their captain was keeping in his mysterious bag and, while he slept, they untied the silver string. Immediately, the winds that were trapped inside rushed out in an almighty squall, which blew Odysseus all the way back to Aeolus’ island.

Alexandrian Elegance

Restrained, highly polished literary or artistic expression

In the gap between the Classical period of Greek literature in the fifth century BC and the flowering of Latin literature some four hundred years later, the undisputed centre of ancient learning was the Hellenistic city of Alexandria, in modern Egypt.

The city was founded by Alexander the Great to mark his conquest of Egypt in 331 BC and was the capital of the Ptolemaic pharaohs after Alexander’s death. A rich and peaceful city, it attracted the leading scholars of the age, who came to study in its famous library. Although Alexandrian literature never matched the classical Greek literature from which it was derived, it did have a huge influence on later Roman work.

Most influential of all was the poet Callimachus, who advocated a move away from the rambling, epic style that had gone before and concentrated instead on writing highly polished short verses, few of which now survive. This ‘Alexandrian’ elegance became proverbial, making a big impression on Roman poets like Catullus, although it has always been associated with dry, scholarly erudition unlike the fresh, vigorous literature that came before.

An Amazon

A fierce, tall, athletic or wild woman

The Amazons were a legendary tribe of women who were thought by the Greeks to have lived in the Caucasus Mountains on the borders of modern-day Russia (i.e. at the outer limits of the then known world).

Living entirely without men, Amazonian women filled all the traditionally male roles in society. According to the Greek geographer Strabo, the Amazons’ only contact with adult males came either in battle, or at special ceremonies convened twice a year strictly for purposes of procreation. They were thought to have been ferocious fighters. Some said that the Amazons used to burn off their right breasts so that no womanly appendage could get in the way of the bowstring or impede their spear-arm.

For the ancient Greeks, these early proponents of women’s lib were both scary and rather alluring. Mythological stories of the Amazons generally show them being soundly beaten by macho Greek heroes, with Theseus and Heracles both notching up victories against the warrior women. The mighty Achilles rather broke the mould by falling in love with the Amazon queen Penthesilea, but only after he’d successfully rendered her less threatening by stabbing her to death.

Incredulous that a tribe of women ‘could ever be organized without men’, Strabo regarded the Amazons as entirely mythical, and most modern scholars have agreed with him. However, there is some limited archaeological evidence from grave mounds of mysterious female fighters who rode the Russian steppes two and a half millennia ago.

It may be that the ‘mythical’ Amazons had a real foundation in fact.

An Aphrodisiac

Something that stimulates sexual desire

Aphrodisiacs are named after Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love and sex. Born from the sea foam around the castrated testicles of the sky-god Uranus, Aphrodite was the ultimate male fantasy, a perfect woman whose erotic charms nobody could resist.

She was also one of the more dangerous goddesses to annoy. Her speciality was driving her victims mad with forbidden passion before destroying them utterly. The princess Myrrha, for example, fell in love with and seduced her own father before being transformed into a myrrh tree; Theseus’ wife Phaedra fell in love with her stepson and committed suicide; worst of all, the Cretan queen Pasiphaë fell in love with a bull and gave birth to the hideous Minotaur, who was half man and half beast.

Even Aphrodite’s favourites didn’t have it easy. The Trojan hero Anchises (father of Aeneas, the legendary ancestor of the Romans) came perilously close to being destroyed by one of Zeus’ thunderbolts when he dared to boast to his friends of having slept with the goddess of love. Her most famous protégé was another Trojan, Prince Paris, whom she rewarded for taking her side in a beauty contest. This ‘reward’ turned out to be Helen, the wife of the Greek king Menelaus, who, deprived of his trophy bride, turned up with an army that eventually killed Paris and burnt Troy to the ground.

Apician Pleasures

Luxurious and extravagant food

The name Apicius was borne by several Romans across history, and became proverbially associated with gluttony and culinary extravagance.

The best-known Apicius lived at the beginning of Rome’s Imperial age. Armed with a vast fortune of 100 million sesterces, he devoted himself to the pursuit of gastronomic pleasure. He is said to have feasted on flamingos’ tongues and pigs that had been force-fed honeyed wine and once made the dangerous voyage all the way to Libya and back in the hope of finding juicier shrimps.

At last, after a lifetime of such extravagances, Apicius found his fortune reduced to a ‘mere’ 10 million sesterces. Deciding that no true gourmet could live on so trifling an amount, he promptly took his own life.

Apicius became a legend among cooks, so much so that a surviving collection of Roman recipes still bears his name, even though it came together centuries after he died. This ‘Apicius’ cookbook contains recipes for top-end, luxury dishes including such dainties as sterile womb with mint and honey, pigs’ trotters with fish sauce and udder stuffed with sea