Akko

Also Known As: Greek Ἀκκώ; also spelled Acco; the woman from whom the verb akkizesthai, “to play the Akko”, was said to come
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: Her name alone was meant to stop a child in the middle of mischief, and in the proverb collections she stands for a foolishness so complete that she mistook her own reflection for another woman.
Role in Mythos: She is a nursery bogey named in the same breath as Alphito and, in a separate strand of the record, the proverbial fool behind a Greek word for coyness and pretence.
Relation to Humans: Greek women used the threat of Akko to frighten small children out of bad behaviour. Adults used her name as a jibe for anyone acting foolishly, coyly, or pretending not to want what they plainly wanted.

A woman leans toward a disc of polished bronze, and the face in it leans back. She starts to talk. The face answers in the only way a reflection can, moving its lips when she moves hers, and she takes that as a reply. The conversation goes on. Somewhere in the Greek world this was told as a joke, and the woman’s name, Akko, became shorthand for a particular kind of fool.

Somewhere else in the same world, the same name was a thing to be afraid of.

The earliest trace of Akko is a line of complaint. The Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, writing in the third century BCE, objected to a passage of Plato that used the fear of divine punishment to keep people from wrongdoing. That kind of argument, he said, was no better than the way women stop little children from misbehaving with tales of Akko and Alphito. Chrysippus’s own book is lost. The line survives because Plutarch, around the end of the first century CE, quoted it in his essay On Stoic Self-Contradictions to catch the Stoic out. So the whole of Akko the bogey is two names in a philosopher’s aside, offered as an example so ordinary that no reader needed it explained.

That ordinariness is the point. Chrysippus did not have to say who Akko was, what she did, or what she looked like. The threat worked in the nursery the way such threats always work: a lamp guttering and smoking in the corner, a child halfway up somewhere it should not be, a grown voice saying the name, and the small body going still on the cold floor. The child supplied the monster. Nobody bothered to write it down.

No source describes her. There are no claws on record, no teeth, no height, no smell, no house at the edge of the village. Her better-known neighbours in the Greek nursery each came with a story attached. Lamia had her lost children and her grief turned to hunger. Gello was a girl who died young and came back for other people’s babies. Mormo bit. Akko has none of this. Her name is recorded as a thing women said, and the record stops there.

The other Akko is almost as thin, but she at least does something. The proverb collector Zenobius, working in the second century CE and drawing on older collections, gives her a short entry: the proverb “Akko” was used of people acting foolishly, because Akko was a woman notorious for her stupidity who, they say, used to look into a mirror and talk to her reflection as though it were someone else. From her, Zenobius adds, came the verb akkizesthai. The tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia called the Suda repeats the mirror story almost word for word and adds one more detail: she is also said to have knocked in a peg with a sponge. It is a picture of effort that goes nowhere, the soft thud of wet sponge against wood, the peg not moving at all, and in the proverb literature the phrase is used for exactly that kind of doomed labour.

The verb she left behind drifted in meaning. In a separate Suda entry, akkizesthai is glossed as dissembling, pretending, and putting on coy airs, again traced to a stupid woman named Akko. Latin rhetoricians borrowed the noun as accismus, a feigned refusal of something one actually wants, and by the early nineteenth century Greek and Latin lexicons were explaining that Akko herself used to refuse what she really desired. That last detail is not in Zenobius or the Suda. It reads like the word shaping the woman after the fact.

Are the two Akkos one figure? The ancient record never joins them. Plutarch’s bogey has no mirror, and the proverb writers’ fool has no children to frighten. The great Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon simply lists both senses side by side, a bogey that nurses used to frighten children with, citing Plutarch, and, according to others, a vain woman, citing Zenobius. Nobody in antiquity explains how a fool became a monster, or a monster a fool.

One modern suggestion reaches for an origin. In her 1917 study The Nurse in Greek Life, Mary Rosaria noted that the lexicographer Hesychius connected the name with askos, a leather bag or wineskin, and argued from this that Akko was first imagined as a bugbear who carried naughty children away in a bag. It is an attractive guess, and it would put her in the company of the many sack-carrying child-snatchers of later European folklore. No Greek text, however, shows Akko with a bag, and the idea rests on the etymology alone.

Her companion in Plutarch’s sentence fared better with modern writers. Alphito, whose name comes from the Greek word for barley meal, was taken up in the nineteenth century as a possible corn-mother by the folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt and later folded by Robert Graves into his White Goddess. Akko was never given that kind of second life. She stayed a name.

Whatever power she had lived entirely in that name and in the dark around it. As a bogey she needed no attack, no form and no hunting ground; it was enough that a child believed she might come. As a proverb her power was ridicule, and it attached to anyone caught acting the fool.

Her limits follow from the same thinness. No charm against her is recorded, no offering, no rite, no hero who drove her off. The threat of Akko worked only on the very young, and ended when they outgrew it. The fool in the mirror had a weakness of her own that needed no remedy at all: she could not tell herself from anyone else. What outlasted both of them was a word, still sitting in rhetoric handbooks as accismus, the art of saying no to the thing one wants.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Akko in Greek mythology?

Akko was a figure of ancient Greek folklore known in two ways. Plutarch, quoting the philosopher Chrysippus, names her with Alphito as a bogey that women used to frighten small children out of misbehaving. Proverb collections such as Zenobius and the Suda describe her instead as a notoriously foolish woman.

What is the story of Akko and the mirror?

According to Zenobius and the Suda, Akko looked into a mirror and began talking to her own reflection as if it were another person. The story made her a byword for foolishness, and “Akko” became a proverb used of people acting stupidly. The Suda also says she knocked in a peg with a sponge, a phrase used for effort that is bound to fail.

What did Akko look like?

No ancient source describes Akko’s appearance. Plutarch mentions her only as a name used to scare children, and the proverb writers describe what she did rather than what she looked like.

What word comes from Akko?

The Greek verb akkizesthai, meaning to act coy, pretend, or dissemble, was said to come from Akko. Its noun form passed into rhetoric as accismus, a feigned refusal of something a person actually wants. Early nineteenth-century lexicons claimed Akko herself used to refuse what she desired, but that detail is not in the ancient proverb entries.

Was Akko a monster that carried children away in a bag?

That idea comes from Mary Rosaria’s 1917 study The Nurse in Greek Life, which connected the name Akko with the Greek word askos, meaning a leather bag. Rosaria suggested Akko was first imagined as a bugbear who carried off naughty children in a bag. No ancient text actually shows Akko with a bag, so the theory rests on the etymology alone.