Sword
object · 14 works · 16 mentions · 28 anchored passages
sword · the sword · swords · a sword · steel · daggers · dark sword · dark-hilted sword · double-edged swords · his own sword
spoken of as
2 expressionsthe sword4 mentions
Medea (Greek) · Orestes (Greek) · De Patientia (Latin) · Scorpiace (Latin)
Come, take the sword, thou wretched hand of mine!
Swords3 mentions
Phoenissae (Greek) · Odyssey (Greek) · On Mercy (Latin)
Then clutching their sword-hilts they closed, and round and round, with shields clashing, they fought a wild battle.
in the texts
Orestes
The sword Orestes holds at Hermione's throat throughout the confrontation.
And it is destined, Orestes, that you will marry Hermione, at whose neck you are holding your sword;
And you also, Orestes, who are keeping guard on the girl, sword in hand, so that you may hear what I have come to say.
We shall have swords concealed in our cloaks.
Odyssey
The sword Telemakhos straps on as he prepares to go out.
He girded his sword about his shoulder, bound his sandals on his comely feet, and took a doughty spear with a point of sharpened bronze;
draw your swords, and hold up the tables to shield you from his arrows.
With these words he picked up the sword that Agelaos had dropped when he was being killed, and which was lying upon the ground.
Letters
Weapon whose use leaves the killer without excuse.
He, however, who used a sword, or any such thing, has no excuse — and least of all one who has hurled an axe.
Bacchae
The weapon Pentheus snatches to attack what he believes is the imprisoned stranger during the earthquake scene.
Then he let this labor drop, as I had escaped, and snatching a dark sword rushed into the house.
Helen
A sword, the instrument of Aias's suicide, of Helen's threatened self-slaughter, and of the danger Theoklymenos poses to Menelaos.
He threw himself on his own sword and died.
A sword is waiting for you, rather than my bed.
—I will stretch a deadly noose about my neck, or drive inward a murderous thrust of slaughter that gushes from the throat, a contest of the blade through my flesh, as a sacrifice to the three goddesses and to the son of Priam, who once sat on the hollows of Ida, near the ox-stalls.
Medea
The weapon with which Medea resolves to kill her own children.
Come, take the sword, thou wretched hand of mine!
Phoenissae
The weapons used in Menoeceus's self-sacrifice, in the fatal duel between Eteocles and Polyneices, and in Jocasta's suicide.
Then clutching their sword-hilts they closed, and round and round, with shields clashing, they fought a wild battle.
But when their mother saw this sad event, in her overmastering grief she snatched a sword from the dead, and did a fearful deed;
After Creon’s son, who gave up his life for his country, had taken his stand on the turret’s top and plunged a dark-hilted sword through his throat to save this land, your son told off seven companies with their captains to the seven gates to keep watch on the Argive warriors, and stationed cavalry to cover cavalry, and infantry to support infantry, so that assistance might be close at hand for an …
On Mercy
The sword as recurring symbol of the ruler's lethal power, notable in the treatise for being kept sheathed or unused.
these so many thousands of swords, which my peace keeps sheathed, will be drawn at my nod;
With me the sword is stored away, nay buried, with the utmost sparing even of the cheapest blood;
You have given, Caesar, a bloodless state, and this, on which you have gloried with a great spirit, that you have not in the whole world shed one drop of human blood, is the greater and more wonderful in that the sword was never entrusted to anyone earlier than to you.
The Law of Torts
A weapon used as an illustrative object in examples of assault and of dangerous sport vitiating consent.
Yet it is said that he who wounds another in fighting with naked swords does in strictness forfeit such a recognizance, because no consent can make so dangerous a diversion lawful”.
“Striking at him with or without a weapon, or presenting a gun at him at a distance to which the gun will carry, or pointing a pitchfork at him, standing within the reach of it, or holding up one’s fist at him, or drawing a sword and waving it in a menacing manner”.
Oedipus Tyrannus
The weapon Oedipus seeks in his frantic search for Jocasta after the truth is revealed.
To and fro he went, asking us to give him a sword, asking where he could find the wife who was no wife, but a mother whose womb had borne both him and his children.
De Carnis Resurrectione
A sword, used as an analogy for the flesh considered as a mere instrument of the soul.
but that the flesh, knowing nothing, feeling nothing of itself, having of its own no willing or unwilling, appears rather as a vessel of the soul, as an instrument, not as a ministry.
De Cultu Feminarum
Instrument of execution symbolizing martyrdom, which ornament might obstruct
I fear for the neck, lest, occupied with snares of pearls and emeralds, it give no place to the sword.
De Patientia
The weapon used by a disciple to strike Malchus, whose future use Christ curses.
But when he is handed over, when he is led away like a beast to the victim — for thus he opens his mouth no more than a lamb under the power of him who shears it — he, to whom legions of angels, had he but willed it, would have come at a single word from heaven, did not approve even of one disciple's avenging sword.
Scorpiace
Weapon symbolizing both civil authority's power to execute and Christ's own division-bringing mission.
"Think not that I have come to send peace on the earth, but a sword" — certainly upon the earth.
The prisons there, and the chains and scourges and stones and swords, and the onsets of the Jews, and the assemblies of the nations, and the indictments of tribunes, and the audience-chambers of kings, and the tribunals of proconsuls, and the name of Caesar, have no need of an interpreter.