ACADE’MUS, an Attic hero, whose garden was selected by Plato for the place of his lectures.  Hence his disciples were called the “Academic sect.”

The green retreats of Academus.  Akenside, Pleasures of Imagination, i (1721-1770).

ACAS’TO (Lord), father of Seri’no, Casta’lio, and Polydore; and guardian of Monimia “the orphan.”  He lived to see the death of his sons and his ward.  Polydore ran on his brother’s sword, Castalio stabbed himself, and Monimia took poison.—­Otway, The Orphan (1680).

ACES’TES (3 syl.).  In a trial of skill, Acestes, the Sicilian, discharged his arrow with such force that it took fire from the friction of the air.—­The AEneid, Bk.  V.

  Like Acestes’ shaft of old,
  The swift thought kindles as it flies.

Longfellow, To a Child.

ACHATES [A-ka’-teze], called by Virgil “fidus Achates.”  The name has become a synonym for a bosom friend, a crony, but is generally used laughingly.—­The AEneid.

  He, like Achates, faithful to the tomb.

Byron, Don Juan, i. 159.

ACHER’IA, the fox, went partnership with a bear in a bowl of:  milk.  Before the bear arrived, the fox skimmed off the cream and drank the milk; then, filling the bowl with mud, replaced the cream atop.  Says the fox, “Here is the bowl; one shall have the cream, and the other all the rest:  choose, friend, which you like.”  The bear told the fox to take the cream, and thus bruin had only the mud.—­A Basque Tale.

A similar tale occurs in Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands (iii. 98), called “The Keg of Butter.”  The wolf chooses the bottom when “oats” were the object of choice, and the top when “potatoes” were the sowing.

Rabelais tells the same tale about a farmer and the devil.  Each was to have on alternate years what grew under and over the soil.  The farmer sowed turnips and carrots when the under-soil produce came to his lot, and barley or wheat when his turn was the over-soil produce.

ACHILLE GRANDISSIME, “A rather poor specimen of the Grandissime type, deficient in stature, but not in stage manner.”—­The Grandissimes, by George W. Cable (1880).

ACHIL’LES (3 syl.), the hero of the allied Greek army in the siege of Troy, and king of the Myr’midons.—­See Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

The English Achilles, John Talbot, first earl of Shrewsbury (1373-1453).

The duke of Wellington is so called sometimes, and is represented by a statue of Achilles of gigantic size in Hyde Park, London, close to Apsley House (1769-1852).

The Achilles of Germany, Albert, elector of Brandenburg (1414-1486).

Achilles of Rome, Sicin’ius Denta’tus (put to death B.C. 450).

ACHIT’OPHEL, “Him who drew Achitophel,” Dryden, author of the famous political satire of Absalom and Achitophel.  “David” is Charles II.; his rebellious son “Absalom” is the king’s natural son, the handsome but rebellious James duke of Monmouth; and “Achitophel,” the traitorous counsellor, is the earl of Shaftesbury, “for close designs and crooked counsels fit.”