Translated from french with Deepl (please notify us of errors)

It’s an object almost as mysterious as the famous Roman dodecahedron[1]… A handle about a cubit long, with five or seven claws at the top, arranged in a star shape around a ring. Many museums have examples on display, including the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Genève (MAH), to which we’ll return later. So what could this curious object have been used for?
Since the Renaissance, historians have defended various theories. One of these can be seen in a fresco from the early 19th century in the Chiaramonti Museum in the Vatican, commemorating the martyrdom of Christians in the Flavian amphitheatre, otherwise known as the Colosseum. Among the tools of torture depicted, our clawed instrument is clearly recognisable. But if it was used in this morbid context, it was certainly not its original purpose.
A striking fang

The most obvious explanation is that it’s a croc, used to handle meat on the grill or as a grappling hook. A tool that the Romans called harpago, a word inherited from the Greek harpazo (ἁρπάζω) meaning ‘to seize, to remove by force’.
In the MAH showcase, the label on the object on display points in this direction. It reads: Meat hook, bronze, Roman period, (provenance) Chiusi. But a look at the catalogue[2] reveals a surprise.
The interpretation of the object’s use and its dating are all different: the claw is thought to date from the 4th or 5th century BC, and to be a lighting accessory, a torch or torch-holder, ‘perhaps used in ceremonies connected with the cult of the Etruscan sun god, Usil, at the time of the solstice’. The object is known by names other than harpago: in ancient Greek kreagra (κρεάγρα)[3] or pempobolon (πεμπώϐολον) and, in the vocabulary of Italian scholars, graffione.
Tell me, mirror…

However, this interpretation remains controversial. Most explanations converge on a single source: an Etruscan mirror currently in the Metropolitan Museum de New York[4]. It shows a figure carrying a kind of torch with claws, from which flames shoot out. It is a representation of the wedding of Alcestis and Admetus, a legendary couple who symbolise married love[5].
However, Italian archaeologist Vittorio Mascelli cites a second source: a magnificent coat hook dating from the middle of the 3rd century BC, found in the ancient Etruscan city of Tarquinia[6]. This coat hook depicts the story of Persephone’s abduction by Hades. It shows Demeter pursuing the kidnapper’s chariot with two torches, one in the shape of a graffione.
The system that enabled this curious object to make light was apparently quite simple: a rope soaked in a flammable product surrounded the claws and the end of the rope passed through a small perpendicular ring.
The quest for the ring
It is this last detail –the perpendicular ring or sometimes another similar device– that makes all the difference. When it is present, as in the MAH example, it is certainly a torch-holder; when it is absent, it is a meat hook. In fact, this appendage is of no use for searing meat on the grill, and is even a nuisance.
It is likely that the Etruscans had both versions and used both. But in Roman times, only the culinary use survived, sometimes with a few sordid by-products, since it was common practice in Rome, to increase the infamy of a death sentence, to drag the corpse with a fang into the Tiber[7].

However, it was in a figurative sense – fortunately! – that the Roman harpago has flourished. In Plautus, the word already has a figurative meaning in a salty invective[8]:
‘Bad counsellor, lavish with sweet words, rapacious, liar, glutton, greedy for money, curious about coquetries, thirsty for spoils, corrupter of the habitués of bad places; flatterer, needy, sniffing out the good that is kept hidden!’
Here a harpago is a stingy person who, like a bird of prey with sharp claws, tries to take and keep everything. Molière, who had a fairly extensive Latin culture, could only call his Miser Harpagon.
[1] See the Roman dodecahedron article on Wikipedia.
[2] MAH online catalogue, work inventoried under number I 0794.
[3] Both the Latin harpago and the Greek kreagra refer to clawed implements of all sizes, particularly for gripping meat in pots… the version we are talking about here is larger.The handle is 30 to 50 centimetres long, often ending in a socket that allows the object to be attached to the end of the handle.The claws form a circle 20 to 40 cm in diameter.
[4] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bronze mirror, Etruscan, ca. 400–350 BCE.
[5] French Ministry of Education, Odysseum, Une image, une histoire: Alceste et Admète.
[6] Vittorio Mascelli, Il rapimento di Persefone in una patera da Tarquinia, Museo dell’Academia Eteusca della città di Cortona, 2021 (vidéo). See also: Cos’è ilgraffone e come veniva usato?.
[7] Claire Laborde-Menjaud, Le corps en droit, La seconde mort de l’ennemi. Dégradation de cadavre, interdiction de sépulture et destruction des restes humains dans la Rome antique (openedition.org)
[8] Plautus, Trinummus, act II, scene 1: ab re consulit, blandiloquentulus, harpago, mendax, cuppes, avarus, elegans, despoliator, latebricolarum hominum conruptor, blandus, inops celatum indagator.
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