Helleʹnes (3 syl.)

“This word had in Palestine three several meanings: Sometimes it designated the pagans; sometimes the Jews, speaking Greek, and dwelling among the pagans; and sometimes proselytes of the gate, that is, men of pagan origin converted to Judaism, but not circumcised” (John vii. 35, xii. 20; Acts xiv. 1, xvii. 4, xviii. 4, xxi. 28). (Renan: Life of Jesus, xiv.)

N.B. The present Greeks call themselves “Helleʹnēs,” and the king is termed “King of the Helleʹnēs.” The ancient Greeks called their country “Hellas;” it was the Romans who misnamed it “Græcia.”

“The first and truest Hellas, the mother-land of all Hellenes, was the land which we call Greece, with the islands round about it. There alone the whole land was Greek and none but Hellenes lived in it.”—Freeman: General Sketch, chap. ii. p. 21.

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.