How an Obscure Character in the ‘Iliad’ Gave Us the English Word ‘Pander’

In the Iliad, Pandaros, son of Lykaon, is a Lykian archer who is allied with the Trojans. In Book 4 of the epic, the goddess Athena tricks him into firing an arrow at the Akhaian king Menelaos, which breaks a truce between the Trojans and Akhaians and causes fighting to resume. Pandaros briefly shows up again in Book 5 when the Akhaian warrior Diomedes knocks him from his chariot, and he quietly disappears from the epic after that. He’s a fairly minor character, and most people have never heard of him. Even if you’ve read the Iliad, there’s a decent chance you don’t remember him.

Many people may, therefore, be surprised to learn that there is a common word in English derived from Pandaros’s name: the verb pander. The fact that Pandaros is the source of this word may be even more surprising to people because the word’s meaning—to appeal to the base desires or prejudices of a particular person or group—has nothing to do with anything Pandaros does in the Iliad or in any other ancient source. The story of how we got from Pandaros the Lykian archer in the Iliad to the English word pander is a very strange one, which involves Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and. . . pimps.

The Trojan War legend in medieval western Europe

During the Middle Ages, people in western Europe did not have access to the Iliad or the Odyssey, which were both composed in Greek, a language that very few people in medieval western Europe could read. Instead, medieval western Europeans primarily knew the story of the Trojan War from two prose texts that were written in or translated into Latin in late antiquity that claim to be first-hand accounts of the war written by people who were actually involved in it.

The first of these accounts was the Ephemeris Belli Troiani (i.e., Chronicle of the Trojan War), which claims to have been written by a certain Dictys Cretensis or “Dictys of Crete,” who was supposedly a scribe of the Akhaian warrior Idomeneus. In reality, the earliest version of this account was written by an anonymous author in Greek in the late first or second century CE. In the fourth century CE, a man supposedly named Quintus Septimius Romanus translated the work into Latin. The original Greek version of the chronicle was lost and is known only from four papyrus fragments discovered in Egypt, while the late antique Latin translation became widely read in western Europe throughout the Middle Ages.

The second account through which medieval western Europeans knew the Trojan War cycle was the De Excidio Troiae Historia (i.e., History of the Fall of Troy), which claims to have been written by a certain Dares Phrygius or “Dares of Phrygia,” who was supposedly a Trojan priest of Hephaistos. In reality, the work was originally written in Latin in the fifth century CE.

ABOVE: First page of a late ninth-century Latin manuscript of the Ephemeris Belli Troiani attributed to Dictys Cretensis

The medieval chivalric romance of Troilus and Criseyde

Between 1155 and 1160, a French poet named Benoît de Sainte-Maure composed an epic retelling of the Trojan War known as the Roman de Troie, which relied heavily on the late antique Latin prose accounts attributed to Dictys and Dares.

Benoît, however, departed from Dictys and Dares by inventing an elaborate chivalric romance involving the Trojan noblewoman Briseida and the young prince Troilus. Briseida’s name is derived from that of Briseïs, a character in the Iliad who is described in Dictys and Dares’s accounts, but Benoît’s Briseida bears little resemblance to the Iliadic Briseïs.

Benoît makes Briseida the daughter of Calchas, whom he portrays as a Trojan priest who has defected to the Greeks. Troilus woos Briseida, and they fall in love, but the Trojans are forced to give Briseida over to the Greeks in a hostage exchange for the captured nobleman Antenor. Then, in the Greek camp, the Greek Diomedes woos Briseida, who proves unfaithful to her former Trojan lover. For Benoît’s audience, this story served as a misogynistic warning about the perfidy and caprice of women.

ABOVE: Illustration from a fourteenth-century manuscript of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troye

A couple of centuries later, the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (lived 1313 – 1375) retold and elaborated Benoît’s romance in his poem Il Filostrato. In his retelling, he renames the woman Criseida (which resembles the name of Khryseïs, another character in the Iliad) and makes Pandarus her cousin who helps to set her up with Troilus.

Later that same century, the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (lived c. 1343 – 1400) retold and adapted Boccaccio’s story in his 1370 Middle English poem Troilus and Criseyde, which has a more lighthearted and humorous tone than the earlier versions. Chaucer’s poem makes Pandarus Criseyde’s uncle, rather than her cousin. He depicts Criseyde as naïve and sincere and Pandarus as a manipulative sophist who is skilled at oratory and fond of aphorisms.

Because of Chaucer’s poem, English speakers began using the name Pandar (the clipped form of Pandarus) to mean a pimp.

ABOVE: Illustration from a fifteenth-century French manuscript of Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato depicting Pandarus conversing with Criseida, who is lying on her bed in distress

Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

William Shakespeare used Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as the main source of inspiration for his 1602 tragedy Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare follows Chaucer in portraying Pandarus as Cressida’s uncle who acts as a go-between for her and Troilus, but he puts his own spin on the character, transforming him into a thoroughly debauched, leering, old pervert who crudely lusts after his own niece.

Unlike Chaucer, Shakespeare had access to the Iliad in translation, and he draws on it for inspiration. The Iliad contains a famous episode known as the Teikhoskopia or “View from the Walls” in Book 3, lines 121–244, in which Priamos and Helene sit above the Skaian Gate and Priamos asks Helene to identify for him the Akhaian warriors she sees on the plain below. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Act I, Scene 1, has a similar scene in which Pandarus and Cressida watch the Trojan warriors heading to battle and Pandarus points out and names the men as they pass, including Troilus, whom he especially praises.

Later, Pandarus arranges a secret meeting between Troilus and Cressida in his orchard, which takes place in Act III, Scene 2. There, Troilus and Cressida swear oaths of loyalty to each other, and Pandarus declares, alluding to the use of the name Pandar for pimps:

Go to, a bargain made: seal it, seal it; I’ll be the
witness. Here I hold your hand, here my cousin’s.
If ever you prove false one to another, since I have
taken such pains to bring you together, let all
pitiful goers-between be called to the world’s end
after my name; call them all Pandars; let all
constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids,
and all brokers-between Pandars! say, amen.

In Act IV, Scene 2, Pandarus walks in on Troilus and Cressida when they are in bed together, leading to this exchange:

Pandarus: How now, how now! how go maidenheads? Here, you
maid! where’s my cousin Cressid?

Cressida: Go hang yourself, you naughty mocking uncle!
You bring me to do, and then you flout me too.

The play concludes with Pandarus addressing the audience to declare that he will soon die of the sexually transmitted infections with which he is ridden (Act V, Scene 10, ll. 55–60):

As many as be here of pander’s hall,
Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall;
Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groans,
Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.
Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,
Some two months hence my will shall here be made:
It should be now, but that my fear is this,
Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss:
Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,
And at that time bequeathe you my diseases.

Lovely. Who hasn’t wanted to read a will and find out they’re inherited syphilis?

ABOVE: Nineteenth-century engraved illustration for Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Act I, Scene 2, in which Pandarus points out Troilus among the Trojans heading to battle for Cressida

“Pandering” as a metaphor

In the seventeenth century, people began to use the verb pander in a metaphorical sense, meaning to appeal to a person’s base desires. Eventually, by the late twentieth century, the word’s use extended to describe the act of appealing to the preexisting beliefs, sentiments, and prejudices of a particular group at the expense of the rest of society.

Today, in the twenty-first century, people most commonly use the word pandering to describe politicians, and most people have forgotten that it ever had anything to do with pimping, let alone a Lykian archer in the Iliad.