English words from Greek myths

Each time someone panics, English is naming the god Pan, whose sudden shouts were said to send whole crowds running.

Names that became ordinary words

Greek myths reached English by several roads. Some words came through Latin, because Roman writers such as Ovid retold the stories and Latin was the language of learning in Europe for centuries. Some came through French. A few were made directly by scholars in the 16th to 18th centuries, when educated readers knew the classics well enough to recognise a name used as a description. This unit follows a handful of these words back to their stories, using dictionary records for when each one entered English.

Panic

Pan was a god of shepherds, woods and wild places, half man and half goat, worshipped in caves and remote fields rather than city temples. Lonely places are full of sounds you cannot explain, and the Greeks said Pan made them. The fear he caused could spread through a herd or a crowd with no visible reason. Herodotus says that after the battle of Marathon in 490 BCE the Athenians built Pan a shrine below the Acropolis, because their runner Pheidippides reported that Pan had promised to help them. The Greek adjective panikon meant "of Pan". It passed into French as panique in the 15th century, and English took it around 1600, first as an adjective in phrases like "a panic fear". Merriam-Webster quotes a 1602 translation of Josephus that describes soldiers who fled "as if they had been surprized with a Panique feare".

Echo and atlas

Echo works the other way round. The Greek word echo already meant a sound or a returning sound, and the nymph Echo is that sound given a body and a story. The best-known version is Roman, in book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Echo distracted Juno with long conversations while Jupiter’s lovers slipped away, so Juno punished her: she could no longer speak first and could only repeat the last words she heard. She fell in love with the beautiful Narcissus, who rejected her, and faded until only her voice was left.

Atlas was the Titan made to hold up the sky. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word atlas for a book of maps first appears in English in 1636, in the title of a translation of the map collection by the Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator, who may have been the first to use the word this way. Mercator honored the legendary King Atlas of Mauretania as a scholar; later map books often used the image of the sky-bearing Titan instead. The Atlantic Ocean is also named after Atlas, through the Atlas mountains of northwest Africa, which the Greeks imagined holding up the heavens at the western edge of the world.

Mentor, odyssey and Achilles’ heel

In the Odyssey, Mentor is an old friend of Odysseus left in charge of his household, and Athena takes Mentor’s shape to guide Telemachus. The modern word comes less from Homer than from a French novel, Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus (1699), in which Mentor is a main character and wise teacher. The book was a best seller across Europe, and according to the Oxford English Dictionary mentor became a common noun meaning "wise adviser" in French by 1749 and in English soon after. The word odyssey itself, meaning a long and eventful voyage, comes straight from the poem’s title. Achilles’ heel, a single weak spot, comes from the late Roman story told by Statius, not from Homer, as the Trojan War unit showed.