Esther 6:8 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Let the royal apparel be brought, &c.— To form a notion of that height of pride and arrogance at which Haman (who thought that all the honours he specified were designed for himself) was arrived, we may observe, that for any one to put on the royal robe, without the privity and consent of the king, was among the Persians accounted a capital crime. To this purpose Plutarch, in his Life of Artaxerxes, tells us, that one day when, in hunting, the king happened to tear his garment, and Tiribazus told him of it, the king asked him what he should do? "Put on another," said Tiribazus, "and give that to me;"—"That I will," replied the king, "but then I enjoin you not to wear it." Tiribazus, however, who was rather a weak man, ventured to put it on with all its splendid ornaments; and when some of the nobles began to resent it as a thing not lawful for any subject, "I allow him," said the king, laughing at the figure he made, "to wear the fine trinkets as a woman, and the robe as madman." There was a custom among the Hebrews, not unlike that of placing the Persian designed to be honoured on the king's horse, as appears from the history of Solomon, 1 Kings 1:33 the person declared to be successor to the crown being mounted on the king's horse on the day of his inauguration. Some have thought that the crown, כתר keter, denotes not the king's crown, nor the royal turban, which it was death for any one to put on without the king's order, but the ornament that the king's horse upon which he rode wore upon his head. It must be acknowledged, that this application of the thing agrees best with the signification and order of the Hebrew words with the following verses, wherein no mention is made of the כתר keter, but only of the robe and the horse to which this crown belonged; and with the custom of the Persians, who used to put a certain ornament, in Italian called fiocco, upon the head of that horse whereon the king was mounted. See Patrick, Le Clerc, and Houbigant.