Lucian Timon 4: another case of σκηπτόν/σκῆπτρον?

Extract

Lucian's Timon accuses Zeus of negligence: even his statue at Olympia has not punished the temple-robbers who despoiled it, although it had a δεκάπηχυν κεραυνὸν ἐν τῇ δεξιᾷ(Tim. 4). But according to Lucian’s contemporary Pausanias (v 11.1), the Zeus at Olympia possessed no such weapon; it held a Nike in the right hand, a sceptre in the left. A. M. Harmon (LCL Lucian ii 331) notes that since Pausanias’ testimony is confirmed by numismatic evidence, Lucian must be wrong and ‘the error is odd in so good an observer’. In fact Lucian could be rather careless over such details; but in this case we can hope to account for his mistake. While he must have seen the Zeus at Olympia at some stage, the statue was also an obvious subject for rhetorical ecphrasis and literary elaboration: one thinks of Dio Chrysostom’s Olympicus (Or. xii); and Lucian may well have been as bookish in his approach to works of art as he was in so many ‘cultural’ subjects. In this case the error would easily have arisen if he had read, misread, or misrecollected an accusative of σκηπτός (‘thunderbolt’) for σκῆπτρον (‘sceptre’) in a previous written source; he would then only have had to supply a synonym κεραυνός for the wrong object. The fact that the thunderbolt is in the wrong hand would then have followed easily from the initial error: one does not hurl thunderbolts with the left hand! The obvious risk of confusion between σκηπτόν and σκῆπτρονσκῆπτρον is illustrated by the problem at Plutarch, de Alex. fort.ii (Mor. 338b), where Clearchus becomes tyrant of Heraclea, takes to carrying a σκῆπτρον and calls his son Κεραυνός. The Teubner editor rightly adopts Valckenaer’s σκηπτόν for MSS σκῆπτρον: a tyrant sufficiently uninhibited to call his son Thunder would also be uninhibited enough to carry a replica of a bolt.