British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 104

Greek Personal Names: Their Value as Evidence

edited by Simon Hornblower & Elaine Matthews

Published 2000
for the British Academy by Oxford University Press

234 × 156 mm; 192 pages
hardback, ISBN 978-0-19-726216-0
How to Order volume from OUP

Offers a unique and timely interpretative guide to the use of personal name evidence in the study of ancient Greek culture and social history.

Within the great diversity of their world, the assertion of origin was essential to the ancient Greeks in defining their sense of who they were and how they distinguished themselves from neighbours and strangers. Each person's name might carry both identity and origin — 'I am ...' inseparable from 'I come from ...'

Names have surfaced in many guises and locations - on coins and artefacts, embedded within inscriptions and manuscripts — carrying with them evidence even from prehistoric and preliterate times.

The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names has already identified more than 200,000 individuals. The contributors to this volume draw on this resource to demonstrate the breadth of scholarly uses to which name evidence can be put. These essays narrate the stories of political and social change revealed by the incidence of personal names and cast a fascinating light upon both the natural and supernatural phenomena which inspired them.

This volume offers dramatic illumination of the ways in which the ancient Greeks both created and interpreted their world through the specific language of personal names.

Readership: Scholars and students of the language, literature, history, religion and archaeology of the ancient Greek world.

The volume is edited by Simon Hornblower, Professor of Classics and Ancient History, University College London and Elaine Matthews, Editor, Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, and Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

The papers arise from a conference held at the Academy in July 1998.

CONTENTS

• Notes on Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Elaine Matthews & Simon Hornblower, Introduction

1. Anna Morpurgo Davies, Greek Personal Names and Linguistic Continuity
2. Laurent Dubois, Hippolytos and Lysippos: Remarks on some Compounds in ‘Ippo-, -ippoV
3. Robert Parker, Theophoric Names and the History of Greek Religion
4. Denis Knoepfler, Oropodoros: Anthroponomy, Geography, History
5. Miltiades Hatzopoulos, ‘L’histoire par les noms’ in Macedonia
6. Christian Habicht, Foreign Names in Athenian Nomenclature
7. Simon Hornblower, Personal Names and the Study of the Ancient Greek Historians
8. Michael Crawford, Mirabilia and Personal Names
9. P M Fraser, Ethnics as Personal Names

• Klearchos II, Ad lectorem
• Name Index
• General Index