Words

Knowing what’s best and doing something else: the Greeks called it akrasia. It means, roughly, having no command over yourself. Aristotle gives it a whole book of the Nicomachean Ethics, and he is kind about it: such a person isn’t unjust, he says, only half bad.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 7, 1145a–1152a; “half bad” at 1152a17.

In the Hymn to Demeter, Hermes takes the reins and drives Persephone up out of the dark in a golden chariot, so fast that neither sea nor mountains slow the horses. In 1834 William Whewell made the word into a name for one end of Michael Faraday’s experiment: the anode.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter 375–383. William Whewell to Michael Faraday, 25 April 1834. Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity 662–663, 1834.

Ceres was the Roman name for Demeter, the goddess of grain and the harvest. Anything of hers was cerealis, and in 1818 English took the word for whatever had to do with edible grain. The breakfast came later: Americans were calling it cereal by 1899.

Online Etymology Dictionary, cereal.

The Greeks had more than one word for love. Eros is desire, the crush. Philia is friendship. Storge is the love of family. Agape is the love that doesn’t ask for anything back. The tidy split into four is recent: a book from 1960 made it famous.

Liddell–Scott–Jones, Greek–English Lexicon. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960).

Hekate hears Persephone cry out from her cave and goes to help, torch in hand. Afterwards she stays close, walking ahead of her and behind her. The road in Enodia is hodos, which also gave us method and exodus.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter 24–25, 52, 438–440. For the name Enodia: Euripides, Helen 570.

Hestia is the goddess of the hearth, and the one who’d rather stay in tonight. When Zeus leads the gods out across the heavens in Plato’s Phaedrus, eleven companies follow him, and Hestia alone stays in the house of the gods. Her name is the Greek word for hearth.

Plato, Phaedrus 247a.

Iakchos began as a shout and became a god. Crowds walked twenty kilometres from Athens to Eleusis, shouting his name. In 480 BC two men heard that shout on an empty road. Nobody was there.

Herodotus 8.65. Aristophanes, Frogs 316 onwards, where the chorus of initiates sings him in.

The right moment, the one you can miss. Hesiod uses it about loading a ship: take the smaller part to sea, leave the rest at home, and kairos is best in everything. In Greek, “the right moment” and “the right amount” are one word.

Hesiod, Works and Days 689–694, Evelyn-White 1914, who translates it “proportion”.

A trip down to the land of the dead, and back. Odysseus never goes in: the ghosts come up to talk to him. Aeneas walks all the way in. Dionysos takes the ferry, and has to row. The way back up has its own word, anodos.

Homer, Odyssey 11. Virgil, Aeneid 6. Aristophanes, Frogs.

Aristotle drops the word into his definition of tragedy and doesn’t say what he means by it, so scholars are still arguing. The medieval Cathars were given their name from the same root, “pure”. Oh, that’s so cathartic.

Aristotle, Poetics 1449b24–28.

A lot, as in drawing lots. Before Paris and Menelaos fight, the lots are shaken in a bronze helmet and Paris’s jumps out first. A share of land was a klēros too, and clergy comes from it by way of Latin. Drawing a word on this page is a small one.

Homer, Iliad 3.314–325.

A woman who leaves her house and her weaving for the mountain, to dance for Dionysos with an ivy staff in her hand. In the Bacchae one strikes a rock with her staff and water jumps out; another plants hers in the ground and the god sends up wine. It comes from the verb “to rave”, the same root as mania.

Euripides, Bacchae 704–707.

Someone who has been shown the rites at Eleusis. The word probably comes from myein, to close the eyes or the lips, and mystery and mystic come from it. The Hymn to Demeter says the rites can’t be spoken, “for deep awe of the gods checks the voice”, and it held: we still only have guesses about what was shown.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter 476–479, Evelyn-White 1914.

A nostos is also a song about getting home. The Odyssey opens with Odysseus trying to win his men their nostos, and failing. In 1688 a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, joined it to algos, pain, to name a homesickness that could make people ill: nostalgia.

Homer, Odyssey 1.5–9. Johannes Hofer, Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, Basel 1688.

In Hesiod she comes straight out of Chaos, before almost anything else, and even Zeus steps out of her way. Latin nox and English night come from the same old word.

Hesiod, Theogony 123. Homer, Iliad 14.259–261.

Rites, the secret kind. When Demeter teaches the kings of Eleusis how to worship her, the word the Hymn uses is orgia. English borrowed it for the secret rites of the old gods in the 1500s. The party came later.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter 476.

In the Odyssey Penelope promises the suitors she’ll pick a husband once she finishes a great cloth on her loom. By day she weaves it. At night, by torchlight, she unpicks the stitches. She keeps it up for three years, buying time until Odysseus comes home.

Homer, Odyssey 2.93–110 and 19.137–156.

A drug, which in Greek can be a cure, a poison or a spell, and the word doesn’t choose. In Plato’s Phaedrus the god Theuth offers writing to an Egyptian king as a pharmakon for memory, and the king says it will make people forget. Pharmacy kept the cure.

Plato, Phaedrus 274c–275b.

The Greek word for missing someone who is somewhere else. In Plato’s Cratylus, Socrates takes the word apart and hears “somewhere” in it. It’s the ache of an empty chair.

Plato, Cratylus 420a.

Circe warns Odysseus about the Sirens, whose song draws sailors onto their island. So he kneads a wheel of wax soft in his hands, stops his crew’s ears with it, and has them tie him to the mast. He hears the whole song and begs to be let go. They tie him tighter, and the ship sails on past.

Homer, Odyssey 12.39–54 and 12.173–196.

The band that follows Dionysos: women with drums and ivy. He opens the Bacchae by calling them in, “O Lydian band, my chosen and mine own”. In Athens a thiasos could also be a club: friends who met to honour a god, and then had dinner.

Euripides, Bacchae 55–56, Gilbert Murray 1904.

The rule of guests. A stranger at the door gets a bath, food and a seat before anyone asks their name. Nausicaa tells her maids to look after the shipwrecked Odysseus, since “strangers and foreigners in distress are under Jove’s protection”. The same xenos, stranger, is the first half of xenophobia.

Homer, Odyssey 6.207–208, Butler 1900.