e name was originally a nickname for these
philosophers, and was taken from the Greek word _kunos_, "dog."

We describe a person who chooses to live a very hard life as a
_Spartan_, because the people of the old Greek state of Sparta planned
their lives so that every one should be disciplined and drilled to
make good soldiers, and were never allowed to indulge in too much
comfort or too many amusements, lest they should become lazy in mind
and weak in body. A _Draconian_ system of law is one which has no
mercy, and preserves the name of Draco, a statesman who was appointed
to draw up laws for the Athenians six hundred and twenty-one years
before the birth of Our Lord, and who drew up a very strict code of
laws.

The word _mausoleum_, which is now used to describe any large or
distinguished tomb, comes from the tomb built for Mausolus, king of
Caria (in Greek Asia Minor), by his widow, Artemisia, in 353 B.C. The
tomb itself, which rises to a height of over one hundred and twelve
feet, is now to be seen in the British Museum.

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 keepi