Onomatologos

Studies in Greek Personal Names presented to Elaine Matthews

F. Marchand, M. Sasanow, R. W. V. Catling, M. Sasanow

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781842177891
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

Onomatologos is a term used in later antiquity to describe eminent lexicographers such as Hesychius and Pollux as 'collectors of words', but here it is used as the title for a major volume of papers prepared in honour of Elaine Matthews, recently retired long-serving editor of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names ( LGPN ): a 'collector of names'. The LGPN, conceived by Peter Fraser, has had as its primary aim the documentation on a geographical basis of the personal names attested between the earliest use of the Greek alphabet (c. 750 BC) and the early seventh century AD throughout the Hellenic and hellenized world, wherever the Greek language and script was used. The 55 contributions to this volume reflect well the breadth of LGPN itself, extending to all points of the compass far beyond the Greek heartlands bordering the Aegean sea, as well as the wide range of disciplines to which the study of personal names can be applied. Besides their honorific purpose, it is intended that the contributions will further advance this field of study, revealing some of the potential that has been unlocked by the systematic documentation of the evidence, mainly from inscriptions and papyri, that has accumulated over the last century. The papers presented here amply demonstrate the value of this raw material for linguists and philologists, students of Greek and Latin literature, epigraphists, papyrologists, numismatists and prosopographers, as well as social historians with broader interests in the geographical and chronological distribution of personal names.

ELAINE MATTHEWS AN APPRECIATION

Elaine Matthews read Literae Humaniores at St Hilda’s College, Oxford in 1960–64, where she was tutored, notably, by Barbara Levick, and after a short break returned to complete the B.phil. (now the M.phil.) in Ancient History, with a concentration on the second-century author Lucian. Between 1969 and 1975 she was largely preoccupied with bringing up two small daughters (Helen and Julia) but maintained a foothold in academic life through freelance undergraduate teaching and editorial work. For one of the results of that period, many of us have good cause to be grateful. She compiled the indices to peter Fraser’s Ptolemaic Alexandria, in itself a piece of careful and meticulous scholarship which matches the magnum opus itself and makes consulting it (a frequent necessity for some) both easy and rewarding. Another very fruitful result was the foundation of a long and close friendship and collaboration with its author, of which more below.

In the mid-1970s Elaine began what was to be a long and important association with the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies and the Journal of Roman Studies. She was involved in the complex and demanding editorial work for the Journal and was at the same time Secretary of the Joint committee of the Hellenic and Roman Societies. A principal responsibility of the latter was the organisation of all aspects of the joint Triennial Conference of the Societies which was and continues to be not simply another forum for university academics to talk to each other. It has served as a showcase for teaching and research in the UK in all fields of Classical Studies, encouraging the presentation of lectures on subjects in new and developing areas and attracting participants from universities, schools, museums and the general public. Elaine’s vision of this as part of the Roman Society’s responsibility to the whole of the spectrum of its constituency and its membership has been an important factor in the maintenance of the relationship between the university and the school sectors which has ensured the survival, and even the health, of the subject through some difficult times.

From the late 1980s, her role in the Roman Society became more prominent. Following the much regretted and premature death of its Honorary Secretary, Elizabeth Rawson, Elaine assumed that position in 1989 and still holds it at the time of writing. For almost twenty years the irreducible core of Elaine, the Secretary Helen Cockle and the Treasurer Graham Kentfield, along with a succession of Presidents, ran the affairs of the Society with an efficiency, sensitivity and sense of propriety which (experto credite) made the office and the duties of the President seem like a privilege and an honour, in the good times. That last phrase has a resonance, deliberately so. In the new world of the early twentieth century, the symbiotic relationships of the Hellenic and Roman Societies with the University of London, the School of Advanced Studies and the Institute of Classical Studies became much more difficult than they had earlier been, for institutional and financial reasons which were not of the Societies’own making. Solutions which will enable the Societies to continue their work and respond to the needs and wishes of their members were difficult to find but Elaine played a very significant role in achieving a modus vivendi at least for the immediate future. That Elaine’s role in this process has been crucial is more readily appreciable in the context of the fact that in the 1990s it was on her own initiative that the Advisory committee to the council was established. Elaine chaired this as Honorary Secretary and it meets once a year in order to identify and consider the broader strategic issues facing the Roman Society in the longer term.

Simultaneously, from the mid-1970s Elaine’s academic career was developing in the context of the Lexicon of Greek personal Names which was established by peter Fraser as a British Academy Research project in 1972. Elaine joined this as a member of the research staff in 1975, was Assistant Editor from 1981–92 and Editor from 1992 until her retirement in 2008. If the original vision of what a systematic, region-by-region onomastic lexicon could contribute to the institutional, social, ethnic and linguistic history of hellenism and of the ancient Mediterranean was Fraser’s, Elaine takes a huge amount of credit for its implementation and for seeing the existing volumes through to publication. Much more than that, however. One of the dangers inherent in a long-term research project of this sort (apart from failure to maintain an appropriate level of funding, which Elaine has averted time and again) is that they might simply become static repositories of data from alpha to omega, operating in the originally established, strategic framework. That this is so obviously not the case with LGPN is Elaine’s great achievement, which can be summarised in the move over three decades from an analogue to a digital environment, from index cards to databases and in making sure that it can be sustained and adapted to new technologies developing at a rapid pace. In fact, while most of us in the mid-1980s were struggling to come to terms with simple word-processing, Elaine was already publishing on the potential of database technology.¹ Migrating a major resource of this type into the IT environment not only presented (and still presents) formidable technical challenges which Elaine could appreciate but also raises crucial strategic issues. How to up-date the databank and incorporate new evidence which will complement the existing hard-copy and electronic databanks? How to make the onomastic evidence sustainably accessible and usable for the next generation of scholarly communities beyond the philologists and onomasticians? Without overburdening this account with technical detail, it is evident to those of us who have seen this work at close quarters,² that the strategic planning and implementation of this process over a period of more than two decades is Elaine’s achievement and should serve as a model for those involved in the creation of digital research resources and web-based services.

At the same time, the Lexicon has not only appeared in recognisable guise as a series of literally tangible volumes, but has also generated a minor academic industry of new scholarship on onomastics, to which Elaine’s own contribution has been far from minor. Her brief account of the whole subject in the Third Edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary³ is a model of its kind. She has spoken at many international meetings and colloquia and has published her papers in several volumes of proceedings. Two volumes of collected papers, which she edited or co-edited, resulted from symposia organised in connection with the work of the Lexicon.⁴ The introductions which she wrote for those volumes are instructive in different ways. The earlier one incorporates a succinct yet comprehensive account of the history of onomastic scholarship, the latter looks beyond the world of hellenism and Greek names, to the studies of onomastics in different societies and linguistic contexts. Both exemplify her ability to see the importance of the detailed work for the broader context. The earlier volume explicitly celebrated the work of the Lexicon’s founder peter Fraser, with whom Elaine worked so closely for many years. That relationship communicated to her a deep and abiding appreciation of both ancient and modern Greek culture and a close association with many Greek scholars and non-academics who have supported the work of the Lexicon. It is appropriate to emphasise the importance of that symbiosis with peter Fraser in the last decade of his life. He continued to work in comfort and with pleasure, in congenial surroundings, in the Clarendon Building and then in the Classics Centre in its two locations (the Old Boys’ School and the new Stelios Ioannou Centre) until almost the very last day of his life. He was an enormous reservoir of academic wisdom and accumulated knowledge with which he was able to continue to contribute significantly to the Lexicon until the very end. It was Elaine who enabled that to happen.

These institutional and intellectual contributions to the academic endeavours of the community of classical scholars gave Elaine a respected and valuable role in the Oxford classical landscape. Her contributions to the Faculty of Literae Humaniores (now ‘classics’) were recognised by the conferment of the title of Faculty Fellow in 1995. She served the Faculty as a member of several committees including the Information Technology committee and chaired the working party which drew up an IT Strategy for the classics centre and its research projects. She was particularly active in representing the interests and concerns of the ever-growing group of contract research staff, whose contribution to academic research has been in several ways inadequately recognised. Her expertise and experience in IT matters was recognised more widely in the university when she was co-opted on to its Working party on IT and Legal Issues.

She has also made a significant contribution in her college, St Hilda’s, which elected her to a Supernumerary Fellowship in 1996, which she will hold until 2012. She filled the roles of IT Fellow, until 2008, and Secretary to the Governing Body, was a member of the Personnel Committee and willingly offered occasional advice to graduate students, as well as unstinting and wise support to her Governing Body colleagues and college staff. Beyond the horizons of classical scholarship, the particular St Hilda’s development which gave her much pleasure was the establishment of the Jacqueline Du pré Building which is now a central element in Oxford’s musical scene. She spent a great deal of time helping to deal with the legal and administrative complexities of the college’s role in managing the building, as well as supporting the organisers of the concerts and the education and community programmes.

The existence and the content of the present volume reflect very widespread affection and appreciation for Elaine and for her many and diverse contributions to the local, the national and the international academic communities.

Alan Bowman

 

¹ ‘Designing and using a database of Greek personal names’, Computers in literary and linguistic research. Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (1985).

² Specifically in the synergy created by the shared premises of the LGPN and the centre for the Study of Ancient Documents in the Stelios Ioannou Centre in Oxford.

³ OCD³ 1022–4 ‘names, personal, Greek’. See also her article in the Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition (London and chicago 2000).

⁴ Greek Personal Names: their Value as Evidence (Proceedings of the British Academy, 104. Oxford 2000, ed. With S. Hornblower) and Old and New Worlds in Greek Onomastics (Proceedings of the British Academy, 148. Oxford, 2007).

AEGEAN ISLANDS

SIMONIDES OF ERETRIA (REDIVIVUS?)

Ewen Bowie

This paper suggests that the poet and prose-writer Simonides of Karystos or Eretria (known from Suda Σ 444) is the Simonides addressed by the three poems of Euenos of Paros preserved in the Theognidea, and proposes tentatively that Theognidea 11–14, 511–522 and 903–930 might be elegies by Simonides, the latter perhaps composed when he had lost his property in Eretria and was with his xenos Euenos on Paros.

Two quite long elegies in ‘Book 1’ of the Theognidea are addressed to a Simonides, as is one in ‘Book 2’, a poem that is shorter, but by comparison with other pieces in ‘Book 2’ also relatively long.¹ Modern students of classical Greek poetry have of course been tempted to suppose that this Simonides must have been the late sixth-and early fifth-century poet Simonides of Keos.² But the author of these three poems seems almost certainly to be Euenos of Paros, a poet and sophist whose activity is firmly pegged to the last decades of the fifth century.³ Several men named Simonides from the later fifth century could be Euenos’ addressee. One is the Athenian στρατηγός mentioned by Thucydides (iv 7), militarily active in the spring of 425 BC, and presumably active in Athenian symposia for some years on either side of that date: he cannot be ruled out. But a more appropriate literary profile seems to be that of a Simonides from Eretria or Karystos, known only from the Suda: for some reason his disappearance from modern literary histories has been compounded with omission from LGPN, but he deserves at least some attention.

The Suda entry is as follows (Σ 444):

Σιμωνίδης, Καρύστιος ἢ Ἐρετριεύς, ἐποποιός. τὴν εἰς Αὐλίδα σύνοδον τῶν Ἀχαιῶν, τριμέτρων βιβλία βʹ, περὶ Ἰφιγενείας.

Simonides, of Karystos or Eretria, an epopoios: ‘The Gathering of the Achaians at Aulis’; ‘Trimeters’ in two books; ‘On Iphigeneia’.

This Simonides’ date is regarded as indeterminable by the ‘Suda on line’,⁴ but the ascription of two books of Trimeters seems to me to point to a time when the composition of iamboi was still a living art: the late fifth-century Athenian Hermippos, cited by Aristophanic scholia with the specification ἐν τῷ πρώτῳ ἰάμβῳ τῶν τριμέτρων⁵ and ἐν τοῖς τριμέτροις,⁶ would plausibly be a contemporary of our Simonides. We have no idea of the content or tone of Simonides’ iamboi. But the title of his work ‘On Iphigeneia’ classifies it as prose mythography. Such a work might be composed at almost any date after the early fifth century, but would be especially attuned to the strong interest in Iphigeneia evident in Attica in the last decades of the fifth century. That interest has long been apparent from Euripides’ choice of the Iphigeneia myth for two plays produced within a few years of each other in the period c. 413–410 BC, Iphigeneia among the Tauri (c. 413 BC?) and at Aulis (410 BC?) and it now seems on architectural grounds that Athenian reconstruction of the temple of Artemis at Brauron belongs later in the fifth century than previously supposed.⁷

There was presumably some link between this prose work περὶ Ἰφιγενείας and the third of Simonides’ works registered by the Suda, τὴν εἰς Αὐλίδα σύν...