δάκρυον

δάκρυον (dakruon, "DAH-kroo-on") is the Greek word for a tear, the drop that falls from the eye — and the record shows it living, overwhelmingly, in poetry of grief. It appears 324 times across 61 works, but the weight sits at the top: the Odyssey has 60 and the Iliad 43, so nearly a third of the whole occurs in Homer. After epic come the tragedies of Euripides — Helen (19), Orestes (18), Iphigenia in Aulis (15), Trojan Women (12). This is a word the epics weep with and the tragedians build laments from; it belongs to the wept-over losses of war and homecoming.

The lexica confirm the plain sense and stretch it a little. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 9th ed., 1940) glosses δάκρυον as "tear, that which drops like tears, gum, sap" — the tear proper, then the resin that beads on a tree as if the tree wept. It preserves the Homeric idioms: δάκρυα θερμὰ χέων, "shedding hot tears" (Iliad 16.3), and δάκρυ λείβειν, "to let a tear fall" (Iliad 13.88). The tear is something poured, shed, let go — always in motion.

For the word's descent, the record matches one pointer, in Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80): he calls δάκρυον a "vieux nom des larmes," an old name for tears, attested across the family — in Armenian, in Germanic, in Celtic — pointing to a shared inherited root (he reconstructs a form like *draḱu-). It is, in his view, one of the archaic words the Indo-European languages carried in common.

The cited surfaces reach past Homer into the Greek New Testament, where the tear turns inward and personal: Paul writes of διὰ πολλῶν δακρύων, "through many tears" (2 Corinthians 2.4), and Aeschylus's Agamemnon returns to it again and again in its choral dread.

If a single word for a tear is old enough to be shared across half the languages of a family, is grief the thing we have most anciently in common?