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szdaily -> Speak Shenzhen -> 
Terms from ‘The Iliad’
    2020-11-30  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

James Baquet

In recent months I have been rereading some of the great classics of Western literature, and have been struck again by how stories and phrases from those early works have permeated our modern languages.

Case in point: “The Iliad,” a story about the Trojan War and the oldest major epic of European literature, is full of references and allusions that we still use today.

Among these is the English verb “to hector,” meaning to bully or torment. This comes from the name of the eldest son of Priam, King of Troy, and brother of Paris (whose actions caused the war). This Hector was the greatest fighter of Troy (as Achilles was of the Greeks) and used to go out and “trash talk” — or “hector” — the Greek ranks before fighting.

But surprisingly, Homer (alleged author of the epic) did not include several of the most famous incidents surrounding the war. The story begins “in medias res,” a literary technique in which the book starts “in the middle of things.” By the time we start reading, the war is in its 10th and final year.

Before the events of the book, Thetis, a sea nymph, dipped her son Achilles into the river Styx to make him invulnerable. However, she held him by his heel, leaving a weak point.

Sure enough, Paris shoots Achilles in the heel. But none of this is mentioned in “The Iliad” itself: The dipping precedes the book, and the death of Achilles follows it (that is, he is alive at the end of “The Iliad”). We learn all of this from later writers.

Anyway, today we still call a person’s weak point his or her “Achilles heel.”

Another important story about Troy also comes to us from later works. The Trojan Horse, the large wooden statue that the Greeks used to trick their way inside the gates of Troy, is mentioned in passing in “The Odyssey” (also supposed to have been written by Homer), but is told more fully many centuries later in “The Aeneid” by the Roman author Virgil.

This incident left us with the term for a virus that is sneaked into a computer for later activation, called a “Trojan” or “Trojan Horse.” It is also the source of the proverb, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

Vocabulary:

Which word above means:

1. penetrated every part of

2. related to literature

3. supposed, asserted

4. literary references

5. comes before

6. “for example”

7. briefly, without elaboration

8. method, way of doing something

9. lesser nature deity

10. event, occurrence

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