The Names of Homeric Heroes

Nikoletta Kanavou

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110422023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Antike & klassische Literaturkritik

The purpose of this book is to contribute to the appreciation of the linguistic, literary and contextual value of Homeric personal names. This is an old topic, which famously interested Plato, and an object of constant scholarly attention from the time of ancient commentators to the present day. The book begins with an introduction to the particularly complex set of factors that affect all efforts to interpret Homeric names. The main chapters are structured around the character and action of selected heroes in their Homeric contexts (in the case of the Iliad, a heroic war; the Odyssey chapter encompasses more than one planes of action). They offer a survey of modern etymologies, set against ancient views on names and naming, in order to reconstruct (as far as possible) the reception of significant names by ancient audiences and further to shed light on the parameters surrounding the choice and use of personal names in Homer. An Appendix touches on the underexplored career of Homeric personal names as historical names, offering data and a preliminary analysis.

1 Introductory notes

‘…nowhere does Homeric and Hesiodic poetry, but especially the Odyssey, seem to be more
self-conscious about language and its relation to things than when it comes to proper
names.’

(Peradotto 1990: 94–5).

‘…the personal name… is by nature partially or fully “opaque”.’

(Paschalis 1997: 4).

1.1 Major and minor heroes (and heroines)

Personal names are present in both the Iliad and the Odyssey in great numbers. Almost every person mentioned in the epics is referred to by name, whether they are main heroes or minor (but active) characters. Names are important in view of the fact that the poet mostly recounts the action of heroic individuals,1 not impersonal masses of warriors. Often uniquely mentioned figures with no function other than a single appearance in a collective list of persons (e.g. of fighting or slaughtered soldiers in the Iliad, cf. 5.9 ff., 144 ff., 533 ff., and of Phaeacians in the Odyssey) receive names too.2 There are occasions when no names are given, e.g. for the slaughtered Thracians in Il. 10.485 ff., but on the whole there is a clear preference for naming the subjects in both poems. Naming is an essential part of character introduction, itself an aspect of a ‘good and well-motivated plot’, as observed already in antiquity.3 Naming amounts to more than the identification of active characters; the personal name in Homer is a wholly fundamental referential means.

In addition to their role as reference, most Homeric names have a recognisable sense (Greek names are generally meant to be significant constructions).4 This introductory chapter will explore the particular nature of this ‘sense’, and the external and internal factors that define it. More specifically, what follows will sketch a background to the potential of Homeric personal names to function as ‘speaking’ names (that is, names that are suited to their bearers and / or contexts),5 taking into account language, genre and poetics; also historical setting, and social and theoretical approaches to naming.

The crucial question, relevant to every Homeric study, just what is meant by ‘Homer’,6 will not be addressed here at length; but clearly the issue of Homeric onomastics is further complicated by assumptions on authorship and on the manner of epic composition. I accept M.L. West’s propositions regarding these difficult topics, namely that the two epics were composed with the aid of writing (West is inclined to date both to the 7th c. BC)7 and that they belong to different authors.8 Separate authorship does not invalidate the connection between the two epics, as one poet may have known and used (to an extent imitated) the work of the other; it is in particular the Odyssey poet who seems to have drawn on the Iliad.9 The often observed continuities between the two epics in plot and characterisation, though not unbroken, allow us to regard them as a unity: the explanation of a name that appears in both epics will be uniform, but different nuances of meaning will be noted. I also accept the proposition that the Iliad, drawing on older oral poetry, emerged through a process of authorial expansions of an original shorter poem on the Trojan war, and that a number of untraditional figures were inserted in the poem during this process;10 similarly that our Odyssey is descended from a proto-Odyssey, which centered on the basic story of an absent man’s homecoming, and was gradually expanded with further wanderings.11 We shall see the implications of these propositions for the interpretation of individual names.

While many names are derived from the tradition of heroic epic, some are certainly the product of the poet’s free choice (but still reflect the demands of the epic genre12). Names of main heroes must be of the former type;13 some have fairly straightforward etymologies (even if exact meanings are hard to grasp, e. g. Agamemnon and Menelaos). Others (e. g. Achilles, Odysseus, Aias, Nestor) are etymologically obscure, and the discussion of their meanings is entangled with difficult problems. The difficulties entailed in the discussion of main heroes’ names (but certainly also of several ‘minor’ names) may have to do with their age, which reaches to the Mycenaean era. Indeed the justification of meanings of names is relevant to the varied strands (Indo-European inheritance,14 Mycenaean civilisation, archaic Greece, as well as oriental influence) that influenced the composition of the epics. As a rule, main characters’ names have a longer and more established presence in traditional stories and are more ancient than the names of minor characters, which could easily be added or taken out, forgotten or created to suit their bearers.15 As regards the Iliad in particular, several main characters (e. g. Nestor) appear to have been attracted into the story of the Trojan war from other bodies of legend,16 and it is therefore not surprising if their names are not exactly transparent;17 such names further appear to accentuate the remoteness of the major heroes from ordinary humans.18 The figure of Odysseus is clearly much older than our Odyssey, ‘a figure of ancient legend, at first probably not a warrior hero but a man celebrated for ingenuity and guile.’19 Older scholarship has often sought the heroes’ origins in the divine and religious sphere - but we shall see that this process en- tails much speculation and few solid results. An important aspect of the naming of main heroes is the frequent mention of patronymics, whose metrical utility is well-known, but which also underline the high social status of the heroes and complement their characterisation.20 Names of fathers are often bound with their sons’ in terms of significance (see below on the names of Atreas, Laertes, and of Odysseus’ grandfather Autolykos).21

The problematic character of some of the well-known heroes’ names is con- trasted with the transparency of very many other names, which draw on regular linguistic patterns (as known from historically attested names). Not all of these names need to have been invented, though some may have been, while others may have belonged to a common stock.22Most of these may be linguistically analysed and categorised according to principles used for attested historical names,23 and their significance is mostly easy to discern.

Important characters in the epics include some women, even though their presence and function in the plot is more limited than the men’s; that said, the Odyssey contains some female characters of key importance. Regarding the explanation of their names, the premises described above stand true for female names too – clarity of significance varies considerably, from the ‘dark’ name Helen to the more transparent Nausikaa.

Among parameters of name interpretation familiar to every onomastic study, to be discussed in the remainder of this introduction in relation to Homer, the historical parameter appears to be of rather limited use in the study of Homeric personal names.24 The following section will show why; discussion will then move to the subject of etymology both as practice and as philosophical framework: the age and character of the Homeric material dictates more attention to this topic than to potential historicity.

1.2 Names and history

The archaic character of the epics means that we have limited access to the kind of information, which aside from etymology, is basic in any discussion of names, that is information about historicity. In literature of the classical period, we more or less know what is related to history and what is not: thanks to the considerable amount of epigraphic evidence that relates to personal names, made accessible now by the LGPN, we can often distinguish between real and fictitious names, real and fictitious characters.25 The study of names in the two monumental epics may include historical sources, which date from their time or earlier, but the use of these sources is subject to such limitations as to allow only speculation and some doubtful conclusions on the historical nature of the names.

The earliest historical attestations of Homeric names are possibly found in the Hittite texts, which were made much more familiar to the non-specialist than they had previously been thanks to the work of Page.26 Previously Forrer had ‘identified’ a number of Homeric references in the Hittite documents, such as a city of Troy, the name Achaea (Ahhiyawa), and the personal names Atreus, Alexander and Eteokles.27 A few years later, Sommer demolished most of these identifications.28 Recent research favours the possibility that Mycenaeans were mentioned in the Hittite texts, that the Hittite Wilusa is directly related to (or even is) Troy itself,29 and that there is enough evidence in these texts to point to a tradition of a Greek-Anatolian conflict which may have been the historical core of the Trojan war.30 However, personal identifications are treated with extreme caution, and they hardly are an object of agreement among Hittitologists.31 Still, the relationship between Hittite (as well as other Anatolian languages of the Bronze Age) and the linguistic substratum often termed as pre-Greek32 affects the understanding of ‘difficult’ Homeric names, as will become apparent later in the discussion.

The decipherement of the Mycenaean script has offered more solid ground for belief in the historicity of some Homeric names (the Homeric poems present, as often noted, an amalgam of bronze and iron age civilisation, and certainly preserve memories of Mycenaean Greece33). The Linear B tablets, the only Greek written source that is earlier than the Homeric epics, contain several Homeric names,34 but due to the ambiguous character of this script the exact form of the names can often only be guessed at35 (but some names, e. g. Achilles, are undoubtedly attested).36 It is safe to infer that some Homeric names were in common use in the Mycenaean age, but this does not tell us much about their use in Homeric poetry....