A condition or place marked by great accumulation of filth or corruption.

Augeus, the mythical king of Elis, kept great stables that held 3,000 oxen and had not been cleaned for thirty years when Hercules was assigned the job as one of his famous “twelve labors.” This task was enormous even for someone so mighty, so Hercules shifted the course of two rivers to make them pour through the stables. *Augean* by itself has come to mean “extremely difficult or distasteful”, and to “clean the Augean stable” usually means either to clear away corruption or to perform a large and unpleasant task that has long called for attention. So today we refer to “Augean tasks,” “Augean labor,” or even “Augean clutter.” And the British firm Augean PLC is—what else?—a waste-management company.

A very rich person.

*Croesus*, which tends to appear in the phrase “rich as Croesus,” was the name of a king of Lydia, an ancient kingdom in what is now western Turkey, who died around 546 B.C. Lydia was probably the first country in history to use coins, and under the wealthy and powerful Croesus the first coins of pure silver and gold were produced, which may have added to the legends surrounding his wealth. But it was Croesus who the Greek lawgiver Solon was thinking about when he said “Count no man happy until his death”—and indeed Croesus was finally overthrown and may even have been burned alive.

Seeds of conflict.

The Phoenician prince Cadmus once killed a dragon, and was instructed by the goddess Athena to plant its teeth in the ground. From the many teeth, there immediately sprang up an army of fierce armed men. The goddess then directed him to throw a precious stone into their midst, and they proceeded to slaughter each other until only the five greatest warriors were left; these became Cadmus's generals, with whom he constructed the great city-state of Thebes. When we “sow dragon's teeth,” we're creating the conditions for future trouble.

The underground home of the dead in Greek mythology.

In Greek mythology, Hades is both the land of the dead and the god who rules there. Hades the god (who the Greeks also called Pluto) is the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, who rule the skies and the seas. The realm called Hades, where he rules with his wife Persephone, is the region under the earth, full of mineral wealth and fertility and home to dead souls. *Hades* today is sometimes used as a polite term for *Hell* (“It's hotter than Hades in here!”).

(1) Lazily sluggish. (2) Indifferent or apathetic.

The philosopher Plato wrote that before a dead person could leave the underworld to begin a new life, he or she had to drink from the river Lethe, whose name means “forgetfulness” in Greek, and forget all aspects of one's former life and the time spent in Hades (usually pretty awful, according to Plato). But *lethargic* and its noun *lethargy* never actually refer to forgetting; instead, they describe the weak, ghostly state of the dead spirits—so weak that they may require a drink of blood before they can even speak.

The talent for making money in every venture.

Midas was a legendary king of Phrygia (in modern-day Turkey). In return for a good deed, he was granted one wish by the god Dionysus, and asked for the power to turn everything he touched into gold. When he discovered to his horror that his touch had turned his food and drink—and even his daughter— to gold, he begged Dionysus to take back the gift, and Dionysus agreed to do so. When “Midas touch” is used today, the moral of this tale of greed is usually ignored.

A victory won at excessive cost.

In 279 B.C. Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus, a country in northwest Greece, defeated the Romans at the Battle of Ausculum, but lost all of his best officers and many men. He is said to have exclaimed after the battle, “One more such victory and we are lost.” Pyrrhic victories are more common than we tend to think. Whenever we win an argument but in so doing manage to offend the friend we were arguing with, or whenever a country invades another country but rouses widespread opposition in surrounding countries in the process, it's probably a Pyrrhic victory that has been achieved.

Extremely dark, dank, gloomy, and forbidding.

The Greek underworld of Hades was cold and dark, rather than blazing like the Christian image of Hell. The river Styx, whose name meant “hateful” in Greek, was the chief river of the underground, and the souls of the dead were ferried across its poisonous waters into Hades by the boatman Charon. The Styx was so terrible that even the gods swore by its name in their most solemn oaths. The name Stygia, borrowed from *stygian*, is used for a country in fantasy games today; but a stygian atmosphere, a stygian tunnel, stygian darkness, and so on, still describe the dreary cheerlessness of the Greek underworld. ```