Ancient Greek Locks and Keys: Bolts, Temple Keys, and Key-Bearers

Penelope's Key in the Odyssey

The most quoted Greek description of a lock comes from Book 21 of the Odyssey. Penelope fetches Odysseus' bow from a store-room. In Samuel Butler's prose translation, the store-room key "was made of bronze and had a handle of ivory." At the door, "She loosed the strap from the handle of the door, put in the key, and drove it straight home to shoot back the bolts that held the doors." The doors then fly open "with a noise like a bull bellowing in a meadow."

The passage names three parts: a strap fastened to the door handle, a key put in from outside, and bolts that the key drives back. How these parts worked together is a matter of interpretation, and the details depend on translation. Writing in 1883, the archaeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers warned that the passage "so often quoted in relation to the construction of Greek door locks" had been "variously translated." He added that it "does not in reality throw much light upon the subject so long as it is unassisted by archæological discoveries."

Shoulder Keys

Pitt-Rivers collected several ancient descriptions of large, curved keys. He quotes the commentator Eustathius, by way of Parkhurst's Hebrew Lexicon, as saying that Greek keys were "in the shape of a sickle." Because they were awkward to carry in the hand, people "carried [them] on the shoulder." Pitt-Rivers also cites Callimachus' hymn to Demeter (Ceres), in which a key is described as fit to be borne on the shoulder. He compared these descriptions with large sickle-shaped iron keys he had excavated at Mount Caburn and one found at Cissbury, camps in Sussex that he dated to the "late Celtic period" before the Roman conquest. He suggested, cautiously, that the shape may have travelled north along with Greek coin types.

These are literary descriptions and comparisons, not a catalogue of Greek keys. They show that large hooked keys used to draw back a bolt were familiar enough for ancient writers to describe them.

The Temple Key from Lousoi

One of the best-known surviving Greek keys is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession 01.7515). It is a bronze temple key about 39.6 cm long, shaped like a bearded snake and dated to about 500–475 BCE. A retrograde inscription dedicates it to Artemis at Lousoi, in Arcadia, where it is said to have come from her sanctuary. The museum acquired it in 1901. The inscription is also recorded in the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (SEG 36:374) as a fifth-century BCE dedication.

The key is long and bent, in keeping with the hooked keys described above. It was dedicated to a goddess, which shows that a key could be both a working tool and a religious object.

Key-Holders and Key-Bearers

Greek inscriptions name temple officials called the kleidouchos ("key-holder") or kleidophoros ("key-bearer"). A 2019 study in the journal Mythos examines these key-bearers of Greek temples. It describes the key as a symbol of priestly authority and custody of sacred space. The office-holder locked and unlocked the temple and sometimes carried the key in procession. The study finds the role attested mainly in Hellenistic, Roman, and Imperial-period inscriptions, often held by people of high status. Temple keys also served as votive offerings and as visual markers of cultic office, especially for women.

The Lousoi key and the key-bearer inscriptions point the same way. In Greek sanctuaries, the key stood for the right and duty to control access.

Between Egypt and Rome

The sources reviewed here do not show a distinct Greek lock type to set beside the wooden pin locks associated with Egypt or the metal locks and padlocks of Rome. The surviving evidence is mostly keys, bolted doors, and texts. Pitt-Rivers noted more generally that the earliest metal door-fastening finds tend to be keys. He inferred that many locks may have been made of wood and have not survived. Claims about specific Greek lock mechanisms beyond bolts and hooked keys need more archaeological support than this batch found.

Related Topics

• Ancient Locks
• Egyptian Locks
• Roman Locks
• Mesopotamian Locks
• Warded Lock
• Padlock

Sources