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Sword of Damocles ▢｜Definition｜1st｜20260915190735-00-⌔

Sword of Damocles - Wikipedia

Sword of Damocles

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The Sword of Damocles is an ancient Greek moral anecdote,12 an allusion to the imminent and ever-present peril faced by those in positions of power. Its main character, Damocles,3 was based on a courtier in the court of Dionysius I of Syracuse,4 a ruler of Syracuse, Sicily, Magna Graecia, during the classical Greek era.

The anecdote apparently figured in the lost history of Sicily by Timaeus of Tauromenium (c. 356 – c. 260 BC). The Roman orator Cicero (c. 106 – c. 43 BC),5 who may have read it in the texts of Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, used it in his Tusculanae Disputationes, 5. 61,1 by which means it passed into the European cultural mainstream.

Printed 2026-09-15.

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Footnotes

  1. Cicero. ↩ ↩2

  2. Westall. ↩

  3. /ˈdæməkliːz/; Greek: Δαμοκλῆς, romanized: Dāmoklē̂s, lit. ‘fame of the people’ ↩

  4. “Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, On the Nature of the Gods, On the Commonwealth”. www.gutenberg.org. Retrieved 2023-06-01. ↩

  5. “Marcus Tullius Cicero”. 2012-08-07. Archived from the original on 2012-08-07. Retrieved 2021-06-07. ↩

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