δράκων

δράκων (drakon, "DRAH-kone") is the dragon and the serpent at once — the Greeks did not fully separate them. The record gives 114 occurrences across 39 works, and the single heaviest is Revelation (13), the book the vision names the δράκων against. Behind it come two tragedies of Euripides — the Phoenissae, "Phoenician Women" (9), and the Bacchae (8) — then the Iliad (8), the Lives of Eminent Philosophers (7), and Job (6). It is a word at home in epic, tragedy, and scripture alike.

LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) gives simply "dragon, serpent," and the two senses stay one word. Chantraine (Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80) notes that δράκων is originally an n-stem, as the feminine δράκαινα (drakaina, "the she-dragon") shows.

Here the etymology is genuinely matched in the record and unusually eloquent. Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010), Chantraine (1968–80), and Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72) all treat the word, and in their view it connects to the verb δέρκομαι (derkomai, "to see, to gaze sharply"). A δράκων is, at root, the one with the deadly gaze — the sharp-eyed creature, named not for its coils but for its stare.

The one passage the record actually cites catches it in tragedy: the surface δράκων stands at Euripides, Bacchae 1329–1332, near the play's close. In the record's leading text, Revelation, that gazing thing becomes the adversary itself, the δράκων the whole vision is arrayed against.

If the word for the serpent is really the word for the one who sees, what is it about being watched by a snake that the Greeks could not forget?