Sword of Damocles

Cicero's Syracusan anecdote

The hanging sword is not Homeric and not a hero's blade. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.61, tells how Dionysius of Syracuse seated the courtier Damocles beneath a sword hung by a horsehair, to show what a tyrant's luck felt like. The court is Sicilian Greek; the surviving telling is Latin moral philosophy. No divine smith, no temple, no relic. Later European proverb and painting keep the image of power's anxiety. It sits among Greek-named objects only because Syracuse is a Greek city; the source is Cicero, not the Iliad.