Skeuophoros
slave or servant who carried baggage in ancient Greece

A skeuophoros (Greek: Σκευοφόρος "Βaggage carrier") was a slave or servant who carried baggage in ancient Greece. Herodotus records that every hoplite was followed on campaign by a servant as a skeuophoros. In Aristophanes' play The Frogs, Xanthias, the slave of Dionysus, acts as his skeuophoros:
Διόνυσος ἴθι νυν ἐπειδὴ ληματίας κἀνδρεῖος εἶ,σὺ μὲν γενοῦ 'γὼ τὸ ῥόπαλον τουτὶ λαβὼνκαὶ τὴν λεοντῆν, εἴπερ ἀφοβόσπλαγχνος εἶ:ἐγὼ δ᾽ ἔσομαί σοι σκευοφόρος ἐν τῷ μέρει.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Skeuophoros” as slave or servant who carried baggage in ancient Greece. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as slave or servant who carried baggage in ancient Greece. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 2, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7534776. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Skeuophoros” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.