Damocles is a character who appears in a (likely apocryphal) anecdote commonly referred to as "the sword of Damocles", an allusion to the imminent and ever-present peril faced by those in positions of power. Damocles was a courtier in the court of Dionysius II of Syracuse, a 4th-century BC ruler of Syracuse, Sicily.

The anecdote apparently figured in the lost history of Sicily by Timaeus of Tauromenium (c. 356 – c. 260 BC). The Roman orator Cicero (c. 106 – c. 43 BC) may have read it in the texts of Greek historian Diodorus Siculus and used it in his Tusculanae Disputationes, 5. 61, by which means it passed into the European cultural mainstream.