Classical clichés

A guide for politicians, journalists and others anxious to impress : how to choose that all-important Classical Tag.

Please email me with any additions, or with any particularly amusing or inappropriate real-life examples. Thanks to Marcia for her contributions.

 

Homer and Trojan War

• Trojan horse
• Achilles' heel
• Stentorian roar
• Myrmidons
• Scylla and Charybdis
• Siren voices
• A Cassandra (always wrongly used to mean prophet of doom; never actually used of somebody who is right)
• A mentor
• An odyssey
• epic proportions
• working like a Trojan (why?)
• Greeks bearing gifts
• to hector
• lotus eating
• a Nestor
• a faithful Penelope
• to pile Pelion on Ossa

 

Gods and Goddesses

• mercurial disposition
• saturnine character
• titanic strength
• hermetic seal
• venereal disease
• jovial countenance
• martial music
• Dionysian licence
• Apollonian control
• Olympian detachment
• Junoesque proportions (of a woman = huge)
• Bacchanalian orgies
• panic button
• Parnassian figure

 

Ancient philosophy

• stoic endurance
• epicurean delights
• platonic friendship
• cynical indifference
• academic pretensions
• Socratic argument
• peripatetic teachers (never of Aristotle!)

 

Ancient history

• Lucullan feast
• draconian measures
• fabian tactics
• ostracism
• philippic
• crossing the Rubicon
• Caesar's wife
• Gordian knot
• pyrrhic victory
• Augustan elegance
• Spartan conditions
• rich as Croesus
• hoi polloi (normally the hoi polloi, of course!)
• sword of Damocles

 

Mythology

• Sisyphean task
• Promethean cunning
• Protean versatility
• Pandora's Box
• Procrustes' bed
• tantalizing offer
• Morpheus (arms of)
• Midas touch
• a harpy
• stygian gloom
• Gorgon stare
• Hell hath no Fury ...
• a Chimaera
• halcyon days

 

Labours of Hercules

• Herculean labours
• Augean filth
• Hydra's heads
• a sop to Cerberus

 

Literature

• oedipal desires
• Cloudcuckooland
• Aristophanic humour
• Thespian talents

 

Miscellaneous

• sapphic practices
• priapic condition
• Delphic obscurity
• Sibylline obfuscation
• colossal impertinence
• calliope