Agamemnon’s SkĒptron in the Iliad

King Agamemnon rose, holding the skeptron that was the handiwork of Hephaestus. The skeptron’s credentials are clearly impeccable. So Agamemnon is being defined as an outstandingly great hereditary ruler, whose skeptron with its distinguished pedigree marks his divinely given prerogative. The particularly solemn activity of oath-taking is marked by a special gesture with the skeptron, ‘holding it up to all the gods’; so at 10.321 Dolon asks Hector to lift up the skeptron and swear. When skeptron-bearing kings ceased to be a familiar feature of the Greek landscape one might have expected the skeptron to lose some of its symbolic power; but two major and interrelated factors made that very unlikely to happen. Pausanias was probably also using literary sources for his conjecture that the skeptron was brought to Phocis by Electra: Euripides more than once mentions Electra’s marriage to the Phocian Pylades

Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History

• Skēptron in Sophocles’ Oedipvs Rex

  Open Access•Francesco Cannizzaro, Stefano Fanucchi et al.•The Classical Quarterly•2019

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