Hector

Poor old Hector of Troy, once thought of as a hero of the Trojan War and who, according to Homer’s Iliad, was killed in single combat by Achilles. From the mid- 1600s, he had curiously and unfairly given his name to blustering and bullying as in ‘playing the Hector’. By the late 1600s, hector had passed into Standard English as a verb meaning to domineer, intimidate or bully, a sad legacy for a hero.