The verb _to hector_, meaning "to bully," is taken from the name of the Trojan hero Hector, in the famous old Greek poem, the Iliad. Hector was not, as a matter of fact, a bully, but a very brave man, and it is curious that his name should have come to be used in this unpleasant sense. The other great Greek poem, the Odyssey, has given us the name of one of its characters for a fairly common English word. A _mentor_ is a person who gives us wise advice, but the original Mentor was a character in this great poem, the wise counsellor of Telemachus. From the names of great Romans, too, we have many words. If we describe a person as a _Nero_, every one knows that this means a cruel tyrant. Nero was the worst of all the Roman emperors, and the story tells that he was so heartless that he played on his violin while watching the burning of Rome. Some people even said that he himself set the city on fire. Again, the name of Julius Caesar, who was the first imperial governor of Rome, though he was never called emperor, has given us a common name. _Caesar_ came to mean "an emperor;" and the modern German _Kaiser_ and the Russian _Tsar_ come from this name of the "noblest Roman of them all." An earlier Roman was Fabius Cunctator (or "Fabius the Procrastinator"), a general who, instead of fighting actual battles with the Carthaginian Hannibal, the great enemy of Rome, preferred to tire him out by keeping him waiting and never giving battle. His name has given us the word _Fabian_, to describe this kind of tactics. The name by which people often describe an unscrupulous politician now is _Machiavellian_, an adjective made from the name of a great writer on the government of states. At the time of the Renaissance in Italy, Machiavelli, in his famous book called "The Prince," took it for granted that every ruler would do anything, good or bad, to arrive at the results he desired. Another common word taken at first from politics, but now used in a general sense, is _boycott_. To boycott a person means to be determined to ignore or take no notice of him. A child may be "boycotted" by disagreeable companions at school. Another expression for the same disagreeable method is to "send to Coventry." But the political boycotting from which the word passed into general use took place in Ireland, when any one with whose politics the Irish did not agree was treated in this way. The first victim of this kind of treatment was Captain Boycott of County Mayo in 1880. So useful has this word been found that both the French and Germans have borrowed it. The French have now the word _boycotter_, and the Germans _boycottieren_.