Palladium

Definitions

1. A wooden statue of great antiquity on which the safety of Troy and later Rome was said to depend.
2. A safeguard.
3. A chemical element (symbol Pd) with an atomic number of 46: a rare, lustrous silvery-white metal.
   countable, uncountable
4. A single atom of this element.
   countable

Equivalents

Examples

“The trial by jury is the Palladium of our civil rights.”

“[H]ow unspeakably ominous to dim Royalist participators; for whom Royalism was Mankind's palladium[.]”

“The presupposition of the Prometheus myth is to be found in the extravagant value which a naive humanity attached to fire as the true palladium of every ascending culture.”

CEFR level