Ancient Greek Name Generator

How the Ancient Greek Name Generator works

Ancient greek name generator: choosing a name that fits

A Greek had one name. There were no surnames and no family names in the Roman sense, and a man was identified, when identification was needed, by his father's name in the genitive and his city or, at Athens after Cleisthenes, his deme: Demosthenes Demosthenous Paianieus, Demosthenes son of Demosthenes of Paeania, which the generator renders in the English form the histories use. The patronymic was the real surname, and since names ran in families in alternate generations, a boy named for his grandfather, Cimon son of Miltiades son of Cimon, the same names recur through a family for centuries. Greek names are compounds and they mean something, mostly something aspirational or divine: Demosthenes is strength of the people, Aristocles best fame, Pericles far-famed, Alcibiades, Cleon fame, Theophrastus god-spoken, Xenophon foreign voice, Isocrates equal power, Timotheus honouring god, Diogenes god-born, Lysander freeing man, Leonidas lion's son, Agesilaus leader of the people, Herodotus given by Hera, Hippocrates horse power, Pythagoras. The elements combine freely, the aristocratic hippos horse, kles fame, demos people, nikos victory, theos god, arist- best, and a good Greek name in fiction is one of those elements joined to another. Women's names were the same elements in the feminine, Lysandra, Aristomache, Demarete, Kallisto, Theano, or were single words, Myrrhine myrtle, Melitta bee, Glykera sweet, Phile beloved, and are much less well recorded because a respectable Athenian woman's name was not spoken in public; the women whose names survive are hetairai like Aspasia and Phano, the wives of the very famous, Xanthippe, and the women of comedy, Lysistrata, Praxagora, Myrrhine.

Sparta's names are a dialect apart, Doric, with its own stock, Leonidas, Lysander, Brasidas, Agesilaus, Cleomenes, Pausanias, Agis, Archidamus, Gylippus, Dienekes, and its women are named more often than Athens's, because Spartan women were visible: Gorgo the daughter of Cleomenes and wife of Leonidas, Cynisca who won the Olympic chariot race, Chilonis, Lampito, Agesistrata. The Ionian cities of the Asian coast, Miletus, Ephesus, Samos, Halicarnassus, Cos, Lesbos, produced the first philosophers and the lyric poets, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Pythagoras of Samos, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, Hippocrates of Cos, Sappho of Lesbos, Anacreon of Teos, and these are identified by city adjective as often as by father, Heraclitus the Ephesian, Thales the Milesian, which the Ionia option produces alongside the son-of form. The patronymics on each page are the actual fathers of well-known men, Blyson, Examyes, Lyxes, Anaxandridas, Cleinias, and the Athenian demes are real, Paeania, Marathon, Acharnae, Alopece, so that a name from this page reads like a line of Thucydides.

The spellings are the Latinised ones English uses, Alcibiades and Aeschines rather than Alkibiades and Aischines, except for women's names where the transliterated k is now common. For the gods and heroes the names were built to invoke, a mythology page; for the Latin system that replaced this one, the Latin / Roman page; for what these names became, the Greek page.

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