Old and New Worlds in Greek Onomastics (Proceedings of the British Academy)

234 Pages·2008·1.81 MB·English

by  Elaine Matthews (Editor)

Contents

Elaine Matthews: Introduction
Jean-Claude Decourt & Athanasios Tziafalias: Mythological and Heroic Names
in the onomastics of Atrax (Thessaly)
Laurence Darmezin & Athanasios Tziafalias: The Twelve Tribes of Atrax:
a Lexical Study
Jean-Luis Garcia Ramon: Thessalian Personal Names and the Greek Lexicon
Peter M Fraser: the Ptolemaic Garrison of Ptolemais Hermiou
Denis Knoepfler: Was there an Anthroponymy of Euboian Origin in the
Chalkid-Eretrian Colonies of the West and of Thrace?
Thomas Corsten: Thracian Personal Names and Military Settlements in
Hellenistic Bithynia
Rudiger Schmitt: Greek Re-interpretation of Iranian Names by Folk Etymology
Stephen Mitchell: The Persian Presence in the Religious Sanctuaries of Asia Minor
Margaret H Williams: Semitic Name-Use by Jews in Roman Asia Minor and
the dating of the Aphrodisias Stele Inscriptions
Maurice Sartre: The Ambiguous Name: the Limitations of Cultural Identity
in Graeco-Roman Onomastics
Introduction
ELAINE MATTHEWS
THE PAPERS IN THIS VOLUME derive from the second Lexicon of Greek
Personal Names colloquium, held at St Hilda’s College, Oxford in March
2003.As for the first colloquium in 1998,1the theme and timing were chosen
to mark a progression in the work of the LGPN project,and in the hope of
generating scholarly discussion which would reflect and respond to that
progress.
The first colloquium had been something of a celebration, as Peter
Fraser’s eightieth birthday coincided with a turning point in the progress of
the project,with three LGPN volumes published,and only the North remain-
ing to complete coverage of the Greek mainland.It seemed a good moment
to assess the impact of LGPN,to see to what extent the hopes and expecta-
tions had been met,both those of Peter Fraser when he proposed the project
to the British Academy in the early 1970s,2 and those of users of the work.
Our speakers were invited to explore the contribution which names can make
to a broad sweep of classical studies: philology, religion, historiography,
fiction,and political history.
By 2003,LGPN’s work on Northern Greece and the Black Sea was near-
ing completion.3The project was already engaged with Thracian and Iranian
influences on names, which awaited us, with greater force, across the
Bosporos in Asia Minor.This colloquium would look both ways,back to the
‘old’world,and forward to the ‘new’world of Asia Minor.
1Held at the British Academy in July 1998.See S.Hornblower and E.Matthews (eds.),Greek
Personal Names: their Value as Evidence, Proceedings of the British Academy 104 (Oxford,
2000).
2See ‘A New Lexicon ofGreek Personal Names’in Tribute to an Antiquary:Essayspresented to
Marc Fitch(London,1976),73 ff.Fraser picked out religion,social history,and comparative
philology and dialectology as major areas where LGPN would make most impact.
3LGPNIV:Macedonia,Thrace,Northern Shores ofthe Black Sea(Oxford,2005).
Proceedings ofthe British Academy148,1–7.© The British Academy 2007.
2 Elaine Matthews
In compiling the onomasticon of the ancient Greek-speaking world,
LGPN ranges over a period of more than 1,000 years.It embraces periods of
epichoric alphabet, dialect, and koine; city states and colonies, Hellenistic
kingdoms, and the Roman Empire; the spread of new religions, including
Christianity; and territories where earlier cultures had left their mark in
institutions and language (and therefore names),and where ethnically diverse
communities lived side by side. For LGPN, the challenge is to present this
range and diversity within one coherent onomastic framework.
It is a recurring underlying theme in this volume that we should recognize
the limits of what can be achieved with names, despite, and to some degree
even because of,the ready availability of an ever-growing body of onomastic
evidence through LGPN. Some limits are imposed by the state of the evi-
dence,especially documentary evidence:its uneven distribution in space and
time, the dependence on excavation, the rate at which results are published,
and the potential of new discoveries to change the picture, making ono-
mastic studies, to some extent, always ‘work in progress’. At the same time,
recognition of these limitations, and corresponding attention to details of
distribution in space and over time may yield new insights.
The second limitation is the ‘human’ element—while general principles
may be clear,we are hardly ever in a position to know the reason why a name
was chosen in any individual case. This argument has particular force when
wearedealing—asinAsiaMinorweusuallyare—withmulticultural,multi-
lingual societies,where the choice of personal names offered scope for subtle
manoeuvres to assert and maintain cultural identity, while remaining in
apparent harmony with the dominant culture or political power.
OLD WORLDS
Thessaly was chosen as the archetypal ‘old’world:in mythology,the home of
gods and heroes, in historical times apparently a fairly static society. Aside
from the long-established tradition of serving in the armies of foreign rulers,4
a capacity in which they are found in far-flung places, Thessalians are not
found abroad in large numbers.Thessaly is also a region of outstanding lin-
guistic,and therefore onomastic interest,not least because of the survival of
the Aeolic adjectival form of the patronymic adjective.
4For Thessalians on military service,see still M.Launey,Recherches sur les armées hellénistiques
(Paris,1950),ii.1139 ff.;for Egypt,see now C.A.La’da,Foreign Ethnics in Hellenistic Egypt
(Louvain,2002).
INTRODUCTION 3
In one respect,however,Thessaly is resoundingly ‘new’,and that is in the
rate of new epigraphical discoveries,notably from the excavations of the 13th
Ephorate of Prehistorical and Classical Antiquities of Larissa, under the
direction of A.Tziafalias.It was a foregone conclusion that we would invite
members of the ‘Lyon Thessalian team’, who are collaborating with
Tziafalias in the publication of the inscriptions, and their close colleague
and collaborator José-Luis García Ramón. All three papers draw out the
deep-rootedness of Thessalian names.
Decourt and Darmezin deal with Atrax, a modest town which until
recently had only fifteen inscriptions to its name,but now numbers more than
500,making it second only to Larissa in the epigraphical league of Thessalian
cities. These statistics are astonishing enough, but they do not convey the
onomastic richness of these texts,which contain many rare and even unique
names. Decourt draws attention to the high proportion of names at Atrax
attested there only once—out of a total of 600 names only 70 appear more
than twice.As he stresses,this is a pattern observed elsewhere,but it is worth
adding that of the 28,316 individual names recorded in LGPNI–III B,15,203
occur only once.5
Decourt’s survey of the names which reflect mythology and epic uncovers
a relative under-representation of names reflecting the Achilles or Herakles
Cycles, and by contrast a concentration of names linked to Centaurs and
Lapiths,and the Thessalian strands of epic.That is,precisely to a mythology
and a history which relate to early episodes in the settlement of the region.
Darmezin draws on an unpublished inscription which reveals the names
of the twelve tribes of Atrax (previously only one was known),and a number
of other civic subdivisions. This is an important discovery, for while civic
divisions are attested at several other Thessalian cities, their names are for
the most part not known. While most of the tribal names can be related
to known anthroponyms, there are some rarities, and some interesting links
to the early settlement of the region. The tribe Thamieies—also found at
Larissa—relates to Thamiai, the region where the Thessaloi originated.
Kelaindai, the name of a genos, is probably derived from kelainos, a poetic
word (Prometheus’wife was Kelaino),later superseded by melas.
Such linguistic continuities are fully explored in García Ramón’s study
of Thessalianpersonalnames.Thispapergivesusinsightsintothemethods
heis usinginthepreparationof aThessalianGrammar,amajorproject on
which he is engaged with Bruno Helly. Through detailed analysis of names
5These statistics continue: twice: 3,957; 3times: 1,904; 4 times: 1,237; 5times: 806; only342
occurmorethan100times,andonly4exceed1,000.LGPNIVhasnotbeenincluded,because
the large number of Thracian names, together with names showing Iranian, Sarmatian etc.
influence,meansthat thestatisticsmaybelessdirectlyinformativeaboutGreeknamingpractices.
4 Elaine Matthews
selected because of their morphological or semantic interest, or because
they contain words specifically stated by ancient authorities to be
‘Thessalian’, he examines ‘latent vocabulary’, that is, vocabulary found in
Mycenaean, Homer or the early poets but no longer in use in the contem-
porary lexicon. He thus traces the persistence of Mycenaean–Homeric ele-
mentsintothehistoricperiod,whereinduecoursethey maybereplacedby
the contemporary term.
These Thessalian studies are a demonstration of the linguistic continuities
to be found in Greek names, continuities which give names their value as
measures (sometimes in the absence of other evidence) of Greek cultural
responses to new environments.
With Fraser’s paper we are in the garrison town of Hermoupolis Magna
in Middle Egypt in the last quarter of the second century BC, i.e. about 200
years after the establishment of Ptolemaic rule.Two hundred soldiers,mem-
bers of a religious koinon, make a dedication; since they give the names of
their fathers (patronymic), the list is a rich haul of about 400 names; inter-
estingly, though they collectively describe themselves as xenoi, they do not
give ethnics.
Fraser’s question is: on the basis of the names alone, can we work out
where these soldiers (or rather their forebears), came from? His is a classic
onomastic exercise, which produces some surprises along the way: names
which have a familiar ‘feel’turn out to be very rare (Theombrotos,for exam-
ple,even though names in -brotosare otherwise numerous),and names on the
root Megalo- as opposed to Mega- turn out to be special to Thessaly.A sig-
nificant proportion of the names can indeed be ‘localized’in the ‘old’world,
and on this basis Fraser draws some wider conclusions about recruitment to
the Ptolemaic army. Like recruitment to the Ptolemaic administration, it
drew heavily on Cyrene, Crete, Thessaly, and the cities of southern Asia
Minor.Interestingly,there are (probably) no Macedonian names.
Knoepfler’s paper is nothing less than a survey of the onomastics of the
Euboian colonies of Sicily and Magna Graecia, and of Thrace, looking for
continuities with the names of the mother cities of Eretria and Chalkis.
Justifiably,given the nature of the enterprise,Knoepfler flags at the outset the
methodological pitfalls.Fundamental problems lie in the nature of the avail-
able evidence: Eretria much better documented than its neighbour Chalkis,
though Chalkis was the more prolific colonizer;the colonies themselves very
uneven in the extent to which they have been excavated, or have produced
onomastic results.Above all,the dearth of Archaic evidence at both Eretria
and Chalkis makes it impossible to measure exactly the extent to which the
Euboian colonists retained or, conversely, renewed their stock of personal
names in their new environment.
INTRODUCTION 5
Knoepfler accordingly begins each section with a survey of the modern
excavation and the modern literature, before examining the onomastic evi-
dence from each colony, provided by the historiographical tradition, and,
where it exists, the epigraphical record. It is an enquiry which reveals some
striking convergences,with very rare names or distinctive patterns of names
found in both mother city and the colony,and on the whole confirms the his-
toriographical picture.It is good to discover in Strabo a supporter of the use
of names to measure historical change: he observed creeping ‘Oscanization’
in the chronological list of Neapolitan demarchs, as the purely Hellenika
onomata of the early years were gradually joined by Kampanika onomata (5.
4.7 246C).
NEW WORLDS
From now on we are in Asia Minor, a ‘new’ world for LGPN but a world
which had absorbed,and still reflected,many external cultures from east and
west over hundreds of years. The remaining papers all examine non-Greek
languages and cultures.
Corsten is concerned with Thracians, who, it is known, crossed the
Bosporos into what later became the kingdom of Bithynia at some
unknown date. By examining carefully the distribution of Thracian names
on monuments and inscriptions in the vicinity of Nikaia, Prusa, Kios, and
Nikomedeia, he notes that they are almost exclusively attested in the coun-
tryside, not the cities. These Thracian Bithynians, however, were not rural
poor:their monuments demonstrate by their craftsmanship and their military
subject-matter that they were high-ranking members of the Bithynian army,
and people of considerable wealth.
Schmitt explores the interpretation of Iranian names in Greek by so-
called ‘folk etymology’, the phenomenon by which a name is assimilated
according to sound and morphology into the ‘host’language, often acquir-
ing a pseudo-etymology as part of the process. A classic case is the render-
ing of names with Old Iranian baga- ‘god’ as their first element, by Greek
‘Mega-’; thus, ‘Bagapata’, Greek ‘Megabates’. There are many instances of
IraniannamesthusrepresentedinGreeksources,butpreciseunderstanding
of the process is often elusive, and it is only rarely that a prosopographical
identityisavailabletoprovidetheindisputablelinkbetweentwoversionsof
the same name. Such identity is provided by combining the evidence of
the Bisutun inscription, in which Bagabux8a is named as one of Darius I’s
fellow-conspirators, with the naming of the same man as Megabyxos by
Herodotus(3.153.1).ItisalsonotablethatCtesias,aloneamongoursources,
6 Elaine Matthews
gives the form ‘Bagapates’ rather than ‘Megabates’ and variants—Ctesias
spent considerable time at the royal Persian court.
Iranian names also appear in Mitchell’s study,which is a re-examination
of the phenomenon, long observed and variously interpreted, of the long-
term presence of people with Iranian names in sanctuaries of Asia Minor.
Officials with names such as Bagadates,Ariaramnes,Megabyxos are found at
the sanctuaries of Greek cults at Amyzon,Ephesos,and Priene,and it is pos-
sible to trace their descendants still holding those offices a century or more
later. Indeed, the name Megabyxos later functioned as the name of the
priestly office.
Persian presence in the cult centres of Asia Minor was not limited to
hellenized cults, but is observable in various guises, including cults with
Persian cult practices,for example at Hypaipa and Hierocaesarea,but also in
indigenous cults such as those of Anaitis and Mên in Lydia. The picture
which emerges from a survey of the epigraphical and literary evidence is one
of a sustained,and respected,Persian presence in hellenized,overtly Persian,
and indigenous cults, over the whole of Asia Minor, over several centuries.
This presence became significant when Parthians and Sassanians reasserted
their claim to control over Asia Minor in the third century AD.
Jewish communities of the Diaspora in Asia Minor date from around 200
BC,and their subsequent spread across the region is documented by a variety
of literary sources; but these sources provide virtually no onomastic evi-
dence, on the basis of which to study Jewish response to their new, cultur-
ally predominantly Greek environment. Epigraphical evidence from three
Diaspora communities of western Asia Minor—Hierapolis, Sardis, and
Aphrodisias—dating from the second century AD onwards, now makes it
possible to carry out such a study,and Williams analyses the names in these
documents in order to observe shifts in naming-patterns over time.
In the earliest evidence,from Hierapolis,the nomenclature is overwhelm-
ingly Greek, with very few overtly Hebraic names, though the proportion
increases if we take into account culturally ambiguous, ‘crypto-Semitic’
names,that is,Greek names chosen because of their phonetic similarity to a
Jewish name (Iason is phonetically similar to Iesus, the Aramaic form of
Hebrew Joshua), or because they embody and translate concepts important
to Judaism (for example, Heortasios, Theophilos, Theodorianos). Williams
charts,over time,a growing preference for Hebraic names,in an undeclinable
form:for example,Shime{on,often represented by the Greek name Simon,at
Aphrodisias appears as uninflected Samouel. The marked increase in such
names in the Aphrodisias texts leads Williams to put back their date to the
sixth century at earliest. She interprets the increasingly conscious use of
Hebraic names as the Jewish response to the more hostile environment of the
Christianized Roman Empire.
INTRODUCTION 7
Culturally ambiguous names are at the heart of Sartre’s study of Syrian
onomastics. Taking apparently clear-cut cases of ‘Roman’, ‘Greek’, or
‘Thracian’names (for example,Annius,Cheilon,Sadalas),he shows,by close
observation of their geographical distribution,that the ‘obvious’explanation
is unlikely to be the right one. His study has the advantage, as he acknowl-
edges,of rich epigraphical documentation in the indigenous languages of the
region, and by drawing on Semitic philology he can offer alternative expla-
nations for the popularity of these names. Essentially, they are ‘ambiguous’
names, chosen because they have a ‘Greek’ look, but have phonetic and
semantic parallels in the language of the bearer of the name.
Sartre’s study is a sustained warning not to jump to conclusions based on
modern understanding of the classification of names,or the meaning of the
words embodied in them.In multilingual societies,rooted in two or more cul-
tures,people did not necessarily think consciously whether to choose a Greek
or an indigenous name, or whether they were worshipping a Greek or an
indigenous god; words were not always translated from one language to
another. This is timely advice as the LGPN project moves on through Asia
Minor, through Caria to Lycia and beyond; and to the third LGPN collo-
quium,which will focus on indigenous names attested in Greek,the relation-
ship between them and Greek names, and what their interaction means in
terms of cultural history.
* * *
I should like to thank my colleagues on LGPN,Richard Catling and Thomas
Corsten, for discussions in the early stages of planning the colloquium;
Robert Parker, Chairman of the LGPN project, and Stephen Mitchell, for
their vital support in bringing it to fruition,as well as for their participation;
all the speakers for agreeing to participate and Simon Hornblower, Anna
Morpurgo Davies, Amélie Kurht, and Ted Kaizer for chairing sessions; and
Ji-Eun Lee for practical support on the day.
For support in the preparation of this volume, I have to thank James
Rivington, Publications Officer of the British Academy; Susan Milligan for
her expert copy-editing of a demanding volume; Mat Carbon for initial
translation of the articles submitted in French;Fabienne Marchand for assis-
tance with Professor Knoepfler’s paper; Nikoletta Kanavou and Maggy
Sasanow for assistance in preparation of the papers, and Charles Crowther
for making his expertise available when dealing with the multiplicity of Greek
fonts.
Above all, I take this opportunity to put on record the gratitude we all
owe to Peter Fraser for the vision and sheer intellectual vigour and commit-
ment which brought the LGPN project into existence, and saw it well on its
way to completion.