If you have ever read the Iliad, you have probably noticed that there are many characters in it who have names that are not commonly used as given names in countries that are predominantly English-speaking today. I’m talking about names like Agamemnon, Menelaos, Patroklos, Idomeneus, Hekabe, Andromache, and so forth. Meanwhile, there are also names like Alexandros, Helene, Hektor, and Kassandra that are still used today in Anglicized forms like Alexander, Helen, Hector, and Cassandra. Many people have wondered why some of these names are commonly used today in English, while others of them are not.
As it turns out, the vast majority of the names that are used in the Iliad have never been widely used in English, but a handful of these names have passed into English through various channels, mostly not through the Iliad itself. Of all the names of characters in the Iliad, the two that have been in continuous use as names for people in English the longest are Alexander and Helen, which passed from Greek into Latin and from Latin into English very early due to both of these names having been held by particularly famous and revered ancient figures. The names Hector and Cassandra first passed into English a bit later via the medieval “Matter of Rome” (i.e., the corpus of romances based on ancient Greek and Roman stories), but they didn’t become popular until the eighteenth century.
The name Alexander
In the Iliad, Paris, the son of Priam and brother of Hector, has two different names: Πάρις (Páris), which is most likely a Greek rendering of the Luwian name Pari-zitis, and Ἀλέξανδρος (Aléxandros), which is of Greek derivation. The name Ἀλέξανδρος was not especially common in the Greek world during the Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 490 BCE) or the Classical Period (lasted c. 490 – c. 323 BCE), but it was importantly a name that was used in the royal household of the Argead Dynasty of the kingdom of Makedonia in northern Greece.
Then, at the very end of the Classical Period, King Alexandros III of Makedonia (i.e., the man commonly known in English as Alexander the Great) ended up conquering the Achaemenid Persian Empire and becoming the most famous conqueror in all of Greek history. As a result of this, the name Ἀλέξανδρος saw an explosion of popularity in the Hellenistic Period (lasted c. 323 – c. 30 BCE) and afterward.
The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names lists Ἀλέξανδρος as the sixth most common masculine name attested in Attike, the second most common masculine name attested in the Aegean Islands, Kypros, and Kyrenaïka, the second most common masculine name attested in the Peloponnese, western Greece, Sicily, and Magna Graecia, and the fifth most common masculine name in coastal Asia Minor from Pontos to Ionia.
ABOVE: Detail of the iconic first-century CE Roman mosaic of Alexander in the Battle of the Issos from the House of the Faun in Pompeii
The name Ἀλέξανδρος subsequently passed into Latin as Alexander and, eventually, from Latin, into English. Alexander the Great was a well-known figure throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, due in part large part to the Alexander Romance, a fictional romance very loosely based on Alexander’s historical life that circulated widely during the Middle Ages through a variety of recensions and translations.
The Alexander Romance may incorporate material from sources written as early as the third century BCE, but the version of the text that serves as the basis for the surviving recensions was compiled by an anonymous Greek-speaking author who lived in Alexandria, probably at some point between c. 140 and c. 340 CE. Later authors substantially revised, expanded, and redacted various parts of the text in various ways, resulting in many different versions of it that are sometimes drastically different from each other. Through these different versions, it became one of the most widely read works of secular literature throughout the medieval period.
The name Alexander was already prominent in Britain by the twelfth century CE. Three medieval Scottish kings—Alexander I (lived c. 1078 – 1124 CE), Alexander II (lived 1198 – 1249 CE), and Alexander III (lived 1241 – 1286)—bore the name, as well as the prominent English Scholastic theologian and Franciscan friar Alexander of Hales (lived 1185 – 1245 CE).
The French poet Jacques de Longuyon in his Les Voeux du Paon (written in 1312) names Alexander the Great as one of the “Nine Worthies,” a canonical set of nine legendary and historic men known for their extraordinary valor. The canon neatly consists of three “pagans,” three Jews, and three Christians, with Alexander being one of the three “pagans.”
After Jacques de Longuyon’s poem, references to the Nine Worthies became common in literature and artistic depictions of all nine men as a set started showing up as decorations everywhere for the next several centuries, including in city halls, on fountains, in manuscripts, in woodcut illustrations, and just about everywhere you can imagine.
ABOVE: Full-page illustration of Alexander the Great as one of the Nine Worthies from the Livro do Armeiro-Mor, a Portuguese armorial dating to 1509
Alexander the Great’s fame and, as a result, his name became ubiquitous. Geoffrey Chaucer (lived early 1340s – 1400) has the monk say in “The Monk’s Tale,” lines 2631–2633:
“The storie of Alisaundre is so commune
that every wight that hath discrecioun
hath herd somwhat or al of his fortune.”
Thus, although its popularity has waxed and waned, the name Alexander has remained in continuous use in the English-speaking world since at least the twelfth century CE. The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources has an entry for the name Alexander that lists what looks like over a hundred some sources from medieval England alone from the twelfth century CE onwards, written in Latin, Dutch, Early Modern English, and Walloon, that mention medieval English people named Alexander.
ABOVE: Illustration by the Master of Wauquelin’s Alexander for a manuscript of Jean Wauquelin’s Livre des Conquestes et faits d’Alexandre, dating to c. 1467 CE
The name Helen
The historical endurance of the name Helen is similarly easy to explain. Helen’s name in Greek is Ἑλένη (Helénē). This was not a rare name for ancient Greek women (although the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names does not list it as one of the ten most popular names in any Greek region). All the same, it probably would have fallen into disuse after late antiquity if not for the fact that the Roman emperor Constantius Chlorus (lived c. 250 – 306 CE) happened to take as his mistress a lower-class Greek woman, traditionally said to have come from the city of Drepanon in Bithynia, who happened to be named Helene (lived c. 246/248 – c. 330 CE).
Helene gave birth to a son, who ended up becoming the Roman emperor Constantine I (ruled 306 – 337 CE). She converted to Christianity after her son and became known as a particularly devout Christian. She made a famous pilgrimage to Palestine from 326 to 328 CE, during which time she sought after Christian relics and supposedly discovered the remains of the True Cross on which Jesus himself was crucified.
As a result of her role as the mother of Constantine, her conversion to Christianity, her pilgrimage, and her supposed discovery of the True Cross, Helene became a highly revered saint in Christianity throughout Europe throughout the Middle Ages. The legend of her alleged discovery of the True Cross is told in, among other places, The Golden Legend, an extraordinarily widely-read collection of saints’ lives originally compiled by the Italian chronicler Jacobus de Voragine (lived c. 1230 – 1298 CE), most likely between the years 1259 and 1266.
ABOVE: Illustration in MS CLXV, held in the Biblioteca Capitolare in Vercelli, a collection of works on canon law compiled in northern Italy c. 825 CE, depicting Saint Helene, the mother of Constantine I, discovering the True Cross
People in western Europe who were literate and reasonably well read also would have generally possessed some knowledge of the mythical figure of Helene. Although they generally would not have been able to read the Iliad or the Odyssey (since those epics were written in Greek and had no Latin translations available during the Middle Ages), there were other sources about the Trojan War that were available to them. Two of the most widely read and authoritative of these sources were a couple of prose texts that were written in or translated into Latin in late antiquity that claim to be first-hand accounts of the war written by people who were actually involved in it.
The earlier of these works is the Ephemeris Belli Troiani (i.e., Chronicle of the Trojan War), which claims to have been written by a certain Dictys Cretensis or “Dictys of Crete,” who supposedly worked as a scribe for Achaian hero Idomeneus. The earliest version of this text was most likely originally written in Greek by an anonymous author in the late first or early second century CE, but all that survives of the Greek original are four brief papyrus fragments dating to the second and third centuries CE. In the fourth century CE, someone (supposedly a man named Quintus Septimius Romanus) produced a Latin translation of the work, which is the version that was widely read during the Middle Ages and that has survived to the present day.
The later of the two works is the De Excidio Troiae Historia (i.e., History of the Fall of Troy), which claims to have been written by a certain Dares Phrygius or “Dares of Phrygia,” who was supposedly a Trojan priest of Hephaistos. In reality, the work is generally thought to have been originally written in Latin in the fifth century CE.
At some point between 1155 and 1160 CE, the French poet Benoît de Sainte-Maure wrote a lengthy epic poem in Old French titled La Roman de Troie (i.e., The Romance of Troy), which relies heavily on the prose works attributed to Dictys and Dares. This work inspired a whole genre of medieval romances about the Trojan War, which the French poet Jean Bodel (lived c. 1165 – c. 1210 CE) classified as belonging to the “Matter of Rome.”
Unlike the Iliad, these medieval romances about the Trojan War tended to focus primarily on the war from the Trojan perspective, with characters who are supposed to have been present in Troy during the war like Helene, Priam, Hector, Paris, Deiphobus, Cassandra, Aeneas, Antenor, Pandarus, Troilus, and Briseida/Criseyde/Cressida (a character invented wholesale by Benoît de Sainte-Maure) being central to the action.
ABOVE: Illustration in BnF, Manuscrits, Français 60 fol. 42, an edition of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s La Roman de Troie, dating to c. 1330
As a result of the combination of the name having been borne by both Saint Helene the mother of Constantine I and Helene of Troy, various forms of the name Helene have been in continuous widespread use throughout the English-speaking world since the Middle Ages. Some of these forms include Helen, Helena, Ellen, Elena, Elaine, Helaine, etc.
Similar to the name Alexander, The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources has an entry for the name Ellen, which contains entries for what looks like over a hundred medieval sources from England alone written in Latin, Dutch, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Walloon that attest hundreds of medieval women with different versions of the name Helen from the twelfth century CE onward. The largest number of the sources from England that are listed date to the sixteenth century, which is when the name seems to have experienced an explosion in popularity.
The names Hector and Cassandra
The widespread popularity of romances about Troy that focused on characters who are said to have been in the city of Troy during the war also made the names Hector and Cassandra well known to readers of medieval romances. The name Hector even passed into Arthurian romance (i.e., the “Matter of Britain”), with Arthurian figures like Sir Ector (the father of Sir Kay and adoptive father of King Arthur in the early thirteenth-century romances of Robert de Boron and the Vulgate Cycle) and Hector de Maris (the younger half-brother of Lancelot and a knight of the Round Table in the Vulgate Cycle).
Jacques de Longuyon names Hector of Troy as one of the three “pagans” of the “Nine Worthies” in his Les Voeux du Paon. Consequently, medieval western Europeans came to regard Hector as a canonical exemplar of chivalry, much like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar (the other two “pagans” of the Nine Worthies), and his image became as ubiquitous.
The names Hector and Cassandra both came into use as personal names in the English-speaking world through the medieval romance tradition, but both names were very rare during the Middle Ages. The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources’s entry for the name Hector attests only two sources from medieval England that mention real people named Hector (a twelfth-century source in Latin and a source from 1572 in Middle French). Its entry for the name Cassandra attests one source written in Early Modern English mentioning a real person of this name in 1530.
Part of the reason why Hector and Cassandra did not become especially popular during the Middle Ages seems to have been because some Christians were strongly opposed to naming children after “pagan” figures. The English antiquarian William Camden (lived 1551 – 1623) complains in his Remaines Concerning Britain (page 65 of the edition in Google Books) about people who name their children after “pagan” mythical figures. He writes:
“In times of Chriſtianity the names of moſt holy and vertuons perſons, and of their moſt worthy progenitours were given to stir up men to the imitation of them, whoſe names they bare. But ſucceeding ages (little regarding S. Chryſoſtomes admonition to the contrary, have recalled prophane names, ſo as now Diana, Caſſandra, Hippolytus, Venus, Lais, names of unhappy diſaſter are as rife are as rife ſomewhere, as ever they were under Paganiſm : Albeit in our late reformation, ſome of good conſideration have brought in Zachary, Malachy, Joſias, &c. as better agreeing with our faith, but without contempt of countrey names (as I hope) which have both good and gracious ſignifications, as ſhall appear hereafter.”
(Shoutout to u/Retrospectrenet in r/AskHistorians for bringing this passage to my attention!)
Despite this early opposition, however, the names Hector and Cassandra both experienced a significant growth in popularity in the late eighteenth century under the dual influences of Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Jane Austen’s older sister, for instance, was Cassandra Austen (lived 1773 – 1845). The names have been in more-or-less continuous use in English since then.
ABOVE: Full-page illustration of Hector as one of the Nine Worthies from the Livro do Armeiro-Mor, a Portuguese armorial dating to 1509
The names Athena and Apollo
The names Athena and Apollo are now in common use as given names. According to data collected by the United States Social Security Administration (SSA), the name Athena was the 108th most popular name for infants assigned female at birth in the U.S. in 2020, while Apollo was the 448th most popular name for infants assigned male at birth. This, however, is actually a very recent phenomenon, a development of the past half century.
As the scholar of ancient Greek history Dr. Roel Konijnendijk (u/Iphikrates on Reddit) discusses in this answer he wrote in r/AskHistorians four years ago, it was extremely rare for anyone in ancient Greece to name their child Athena or Apollo, since, in general, for them, these were names of deities, not names for humans. There are a few attested cases of people being given the names of deities and there is not clear surviving evidence that doing this was regarded as hubris, but, in any case, it was certainly not something people normally did.
It was far more common for a parent to give their child a theophoric (“deity-bearing”) name like Ἀθηνόδωρος (Athēnódōros), Ἀπολλόδωρος (Apollódōros), or Ἀπολλώνιος (Apollṓnios), rather than outright name them Athena or Apollo. These are names that contain the names of deities, but are not actually the names of deities themselves. Theophoric names of this variety were extremely common. In fact, The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names lists Ἀπολλώνιος as one of the ten most commonly attested masculine names for every region of ancient Greece.
After the Roman Empire converted to Christianity over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, Christianity became the dominant religion in the Mediterranean world. During the Middle Ages, it became the dominant religion throughout most of Europe. Then, during the Early Modern Period, as the result of European colonialism, it became the dominant religion of the parts of the world that are now called “the west.”
Christians in the English-speaking world have, for a very long time, found it highly inappropriate for someone to name their child after a “pagan” deity. They have been willing to tolerate certain ancient theophoric names that were borne by early Christian saints—such as the name Dennis, which is derived from the Greek name Διονύσιος (Dionýsios), which means “of Dionysos”—but generally outright naming your child “Athena,” “Apollo,” or “Zeus” has been a big no-no for Christians.
Over the course of the past couple of centuries, though, and especially over the course of the past half century or so, the general populations in most countries where English is the most commonly spoken language have become increasingly less Christian. Traditional Christian taboos against naming children after “pagan” deities therefore hold less influence. Meanwhile, members of the general public remain widely aware of the stories of deities in Greek mythology. As a result of the convergence of these two historical trends, names of Greek deities are starting to become popular as personal names for really the first time in history.
ABOVE: Detail of Apollo (left) and Athena (right) standing next to each other from an Apulian red-figure volute-krater attributed to the Underworld Painter dating to between c. 330 and c. 323 BCE, currently held in the collection of the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University
(NOTE: This post is adapted from an answer I originally wrote for r/AskHistorians.)
I’ve somewhat been reading the Iliad myself. Personally it’s alright, but I tend to get lost in the battle scenes as a lot seems to be going on. Still it’s nice to get around to reading something that’s well known, but personally I prefer the Odyssey over the Iliad.
I used to strongly prefer the Odyssey over the Iliad as well, but the Iliad has grown on me significantly over the course of my time as an undergraduate, in part because I have reread it several times and learned to understand it better.
I took CLAS-C 101 my freshman year, in which we were assigned to read excerpts from the Iliad in English translation and the professor gave lectures about the interpretation of those excerpts. Then I took a course my sophomore year in which we were assigned to read the entire Iliad in English translation over the course of several weeks and we spent a lot of time discussing the poem in class. Now I am currently in a graduate-level course in which we are reading the entire Iliad in English translation, substantial portions of each book of the epic in the original Homeric Greek (with each section being between roughly ninety and 130 lines), and a large number of scholarly articles analyzing and interpreting the poem.
I have, among other things, gained a much deeper understanding of the tremendous literary skill that must have gone into the composition of the Iliad. It is a truly brilliant work of literature.
Maybe reading is all I need, plus guides like Shoop which break down what’s exactly happening in the books.
Trying to read the Iliad can certainly be a confusing experience, especially if it is your first time. There are so many different characters in the poem, some of whom only show up once and never again, and they have all sorts of long names that are really difficult to remember that make them especially difficult to keep track of. The Odyssey is easier to follow, since it is at least mostly focused on the character of Odysseus and there are fewer minor characters that one has to keep track of.
Nonetheless, despite the confusing aspects, reading the Iliad can be very rewarding.
I’m not educated enough to read these classics in their original languages, but I have been very engaged in reading the Stanley Lombardo translations, these seem so vivid and alive to me compared to some of the more “stately” translations. SM, what is your impression of those versions, and what translators are your favorite(s)?
The translations of the Homeric Epics I’ve read are by Robert Fagles. I always try to get access to translations of works in contemporary language as I feel like I can understand the text better. Wonder if Spencer has any thoughts on those as well.
I have the Fagles translations, and I think they are justly celebrated as being brilliant. Those and Lombardo’s are my go-to’s. I’ve read older translations and they do not compare at all.
I personally think that the idiolect of a translation should try to match the idiolect of the work in the original language. The Iliad and the Odyssey make extensive use of formulaic language and are composed in a form of Greek that was already archaic at the time they were composed and that became even more archaic as time progressed. I think it is good for English translations of the Homeric epics to try to imitate this very formulaic, archaic language. (By contrast, Sophokles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon all composed their works in fairly standard Attic Greek, which was the everyday dialect of Greek spoken in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, so I think translations of their works should try to more closely match contemporary English.)
I would not under any circumstances recommend George Chapman or Alexander Pope’s translations, since they both take enormous liberties with the Greek and they both try to force Homer into rhyming couplets, which I think are entirely ill-suited for Homer and epic poetry in general. I think Chapman and Pope would have done far better to translate Homer into blank verse (i.e., unrhymed iambic pentameter, the poetic form John Milton uses for his epic poem Paradise Lost).
Richard Lattimore’s translations are known for being extremely faithful to Homer’s original Greek. That being said, I haven’t read enough of them to be able to give a personal opinion.
I will always have a personal attachment to Robert Fitzgerald’s translations because those are the ones I first read back when I read the Iliad and the Odyssey for the first time in seventh grade. I still really like his poetic cadence and I think he strikes a nice balance between imitating the archaic, heavily formulaic language of the original Greek and making his translations understandable to modern readers. Now that I’ve learned Greek, I know that Fitzgerald’s translations are relatively faithful to the original Greek compared to, say, Chapman, Pope, or Fagles, but he still takes far more liberties than I would like and strangely he sometimes skips over certain lines entirely, such as the famous line in the Odyssey, Book One, where Telemachos tells Penelope that talking is men’s business.
Robert Fagles’s translations are probably the most popular translations out there. They are written in colloquial, easy-to-understand English, they use beautifully poetic language, and the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions have extraordinarily beautiful, ornate covers. That being said, I am not really a fan of Fagles’s translations, since he is, in general, extremely loose with the Greek, he dispenses with most of the formulaic language, and he has a habit of inserting modern idioms and colloquialisms that aren’t there in the original.
Caroline Alexander’s 2015 translation of the Iliad stays very close to the original Greek text of Homer, to such an extent that the line numbers actually line up exactly with the Greek. Alexander has only translated the Iliad and she does not have a translation of the Odyssey, but Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey is relatively faithful to the original Greek and has won extremely high praise from many scholars and poets alike. It is also composed in unrhymed iambic pentameter, which, as I mentioned earlier, I think works extremely well for Homer.
I haven’t read Stanley Lombardo’s translations, so I can’t give any personal opinion on them.
Although they’re not from the Iliad, there are a few popular names from Classical mythology you didn’t mention here. You mentioned Diana in a response on r/AskHistorians, but what about Jason and Penelope?
Off course, many names over the years got shortened or ‘folked in’ to the point that very few people now remember the classical example. So now we have ‘Sandra’ and ‘Sandy’for Cassandra, ‘Ellie’ for Helena and ‘Penny’ for Penelope. And after some time people tend not to look at the original ancestry but get their inspiration from a famous grandmother, literary character, royal or actress of that name
Thank you for this, Spencer. I enjoy reading about names. I’ve never thought of “Jennifer” the same way since a friend with that name said it was a modern version of Guinevere/Gwynhwyfar. I confess I have yet to read either the Iliad or the Odyssey in any proper adult translation, and grudge that so much French and English literature is derived from the classical era. Thank you especially for the old French tidbits. Stay well.
Interesting essay! I recall the wife of one of the earlier Byzantine emperors was named Athenais (and was a native of Athens), daughter of a pagan, and took the name Eirene (?) or something after marriage and conversion. Would that name have been a derivative of Athena, or reflecting her city of origin?
I have noted the brilliant name Athena Christianakis in credits to Batman: The Animated Series — she was an accountant in some way — and was sorry to see this changed to “Wingate” after a marriage eventually. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1208332/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
And then there was Athina Onassis! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Onassis_Niarchos
I will be amused to encounter Athenas and Apollos in the next generation.
It seems to me that Spanish has retained more of those names than English. For example, Hebe, Néstor, and Ulises (from Ἥβη, Νέστωρ, and Ulixes, the Latin name for Ὀδυσσεύς) are still very common person names in Spanish-speaking countries.
Italian seems to have some other ones too, such as Achille (like in Achille Lauro) and Enea.
Orestes is also used in Spanish-speaking countries, but it’s far less common.
Yes, talking from experience, at least in Mexico, I’ve met a lots of Héctor and Helena, some Ulises but I’ve also met some Ifigenia, Clitemnestra (this one surprised me a lot) Briseida, and like 3 Aquiles.
By the way, did Constantine’s mother convert to Christianity after his son? I thought it was the other way round.
I think you have misread what I have written above. I did not say that Helene converted to Christianity after Constantine I’s son; I said that she converted to Christianity after her own son (i.e., Constantine I himself).
Sorry, that was a lapsus. I wanted to write “after her son.”
On Kevin’s comment about Eirene. It has nothing to do with Athina. It is a proper Greek name (Ειρήνη in Greek) which means peace.
I believe Kevin was asking about the name Athenais, and its possible relation to Athena or Athens, not about the name Eirene.
Yes, you have the rights of it. Anyway, I shook off my laziness and dug out the exact reference that sparked my original comment. The girl was Athenais, daughter of Leontius, a professor at the university of Athens, and she came to the court at Constantinople in AD 420 seeking justice in a disputed will and wound up attracting the attention of the Eastern emperor Theodosius II due to her great beauty and “exquisite Greek,” in the words of John Julius Norwich (this is all taken from his “Byzantium: The Early Centuries” book). Despite being brought up a pagan, she and Theodosius were soon married and Athenais converted to Christianity and took the name Eudocia (NOT Eirene; I was misremembering that part).