Word of the Day
Saturday, December 01, 2001
pantheon
\PAN-thee-on; -uhn\ , noun;
1.
A temple dedicated to all the gods; especially (capitalized), the building so called at Rome.
2.
The collective gods of a people; as, a goddess of the Greek pantheon.
3.
A public building commemorating and dedicated to the famous dead of a nation.
4.
A group of highly esteemed persons.
Quotes:
Well into the fourteenth century the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Prince Gediminas, still put his faith in Perkunas, the god of thunder and forests, who ruled over the many other gods and goddesses in the Lithuanian pantheon.
-- Yaffa Eliach, There Once Was a World
What [Galileo] discovered . . . would soon do nothing less than revolutionize astronomy, change forever the way the inhabitants of this planet conceived the universe beyond it, and . . . land him in the pantheon of immortal scientists.
-- William E. Burrows, This New Ocean
Argentina had spawned its own pantheon of civic-minded historical heroes, from General Jose de San Martin, the country's liberator in the independence struggle with Spain, to Domingo Sarmiento, the crusading journalist, educator, and president who had finally wrested Argentina into the modern age as a unified republic.
-- Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
Origin:
Pantheon comes from Greek pantheion, "temple of all the gods," from pan-, "all" + theos, "god."
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