, "because someone said that your father was back (home)" (canto I, verse 194). In this context, epidemios means indigenous or endemic. In the Iliad, Homer confirmed this meaning (canto XXIV, verse 262), by using 2,500-year Evolution of the Term Epidemic also polemos epidemios to mean civil war: , "this one who liked passionately the frightening civil war" (canto IX, verse 64). Later, Plato and Xenophon (400 BC) used the word to describe a stay in a country or the arrival of a person: