I was comparing the way different names and nominal epithets for Dionysus are used across a wide swathe of ancient Greek texts, to see if I could establish when/whether some of the nominal epithets were actually names of regional deities who had wound up being identified with/syncretized into Dionysus. Like, if text X always calls Dionysus 'god of the sown field', and is from Y region, do only other texts from region Y use this epithet, and does that remain consistent over time, or does usage spread, and if so how? Or do new epithets for gods textually appear across widespread geographic areas at about the same time?
The specific thing I was looking at was contrasting the actual name 'Dionysus', which is everywhere, with 'Eubouleus', which means 'god of the sown/well-plowed field' and which is very narrow in usage, as it's much more agricultural than Dionysus epithets often get. 'Eubouleus' turns up in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and I wanted to see if I could find any hint of it being a syncretization, because that's such an old text that the gods in it take quite different forms than they often do later. Dionysus is generally assumed to be a late-comer among the Greek gods, as worship of the others was pretty well-established before his cult arose, and I wanted to see if he'd been mapped onto an older harvest god. Proof of that happening would tell us some interesting things about the Eleusinian Mysteries, for example.
And what I found was a big, shiny pile of insufficient data. :D I got to play with some really fun directions of textual analysis, but we simply do not have enough material from the relevant time period for me to prove or disprove anything. The Hymns are so pretty on their original tablets, though, they're on gold leaf, like 1/32nd-of-an-inch-thick gold leaf, it's amazing they survived. And I basically got to tell my department that while textual analysis tools have been advancing in leaps and bounds the last couple of decades, they have not moved in directions as of yet which will enable us to get much we don't already know out of this kind of text, so it's not worth trying large-scale. My department wanted to know that-- saves a lot of people a lot of time-- so they passed the paper.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2018-01-05 02:28 am (UTC)The specific thing I was looking at was contrasting the actual name 'Dionysus', which is everywhere, with 'Eubouleus', which means 'god of the sown/well-plowed field' and which is very narrow in usage, as it's much more agricultural than Dionysus epithets often get. 'Eubouleus' turns up in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and I wanted to see if I could find any hint of it being a syncretization, because that's such an old text that the gods in it take quite different forms than they often do later. Dionysus is generally assumed to be a late-comer among the Greek gods, as worship of the others was pretty well-established before his cult arose, and I wanted to see if he'd been mapped onto an older harvest god. Proof of that happening would tell us some interesting things about the Eleusinian Mysteries, for example.
And what I found was a big, shiny pile of insufficient data. :D I got to play with some really fun directions of textual analysis, but we simply do not have enough material from the relevant time period for me to prove or disprove anything. The Hymns are so pretty on their original tablets, though, they're on gold leaf, like 1/32nd-of-an-inch-thick gold leaf, it's amazing they survived. And I basically got to tell my department that while textual analysis tools have been advancing in leaps and bounds the last couple of decades, they have not moved in directions as of yet which will enable us to get much we don't already know out of this kind of text, so it's not worth trying large-scale. My department wanted to know that-- saves a lot of people a lot of time-- so they passed the paper.
I was very glad to get to meet you, too!