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Not all oaths require the staging of an animal immolation, as already attested by the song I of theIliad : Achilles brandishes the sceptre he holds in his hand to address the assembly of warriors and makes the object " the great oath " of his withdrawal from the battlefield. This type of equivalence leads us to recall the interpretations of the very namehorkos, understood either as the object one seizes when swearing (Benveniste), or as a morphological variation of the term herkos, the " barrier ", the " enclosure " (Bollack), thus forming the framework that the swearer cannot transgress. Without deciding between these perspectives, which linguists leave open, we emphasize their respective interest in understanding the representations conveyed by the term for the ancients.
Returning then to classical Athens, the aim is to clarify the relationship between the animal sacrifice attested at the presentation of children within the phratries and the oaths pronounced on this occasion. There is no evidence to suggest that the swearers pledged shares in an animal other than the one provided by the child's introducer : an oath of this type may therefore be associated with the burning of the divine share during a thusia-type ritual.
