AUTHOR’S NOTE

In this book I use the abbreviation BCE (equivalent to BC) whenever the year or century referred to falls before the start of the Common/Current Era. BCE dates are counted down, so the fourteenth century BCE comes before the thirteenth century, and so on.

For more than two and a half millennia, Greek names of people and places have been written in the Greek alphabet, described in Chapter 2. Various conventions have been used at different times to represent these names in the Latin, or roman, alphabet that we use in English. Because pronunciation has changed over the centuries, the sounds represented by several letters of the Greek alphabet are not the same today as they were in ancient times. There is therefore no fully consistent way to write Greek names in English. The problem is compounded because there is a long-established practice of representing ancient Greek names in the Latin forms adopted by the ancient Romans. These are usually far more recognisable in English today than a more rigorous transliteration direct from Greek: ‘Thucydides’, for example, is the Latin transcription for the name of the historian whose name was more accurately Thoukydides. Particularly well-known names, of both places and people, have long since acquired English equivalents: ‘Athens’, not ‘Athenai’ (ancient) or ‘Athina’ (modern); ‘Plutarch’, not ‘Ploutarchos’.

I have tried to follow these principles in the pages that follow:

• Whenever a name has a reasonably well established English equivalent, I use that (‘Thessalonica’, not ‘Thessalonike’; ‘Jesus’, not ‘Iesous’).

• Up to the end of Chapter 7, I use latinised spellings for most Greek names, with exceptions for place names which are today more familiar in their Greek form, so ‘Mycenae’ (latinised), not ‘Mykenai’; but ‘Knossos’, not the latinised Cnossus.

• For the Byzantine period, I use the closest equivalent to the Greek letters of the name: so ‘Anna Komnene’, not ‘Anna Comnena’; although older generations of scholars once did so, it makes no sense to latinise the names of people who lived after the end of the Latin-speaking Roman Empire.

• For the modern period, I adapt the same principle so as to reflect today’s pronunciation (so, someone called ‘John’ in the Byzantine period will be ‘Ioannes’, but in the modern, ‘Ioannis’ or the more colloquial ‘Yannis’).