A Polymorphic Goddess: The Multiple Dialectal Variants of Athena’s Name in Attic Poetry

This paper investigates the unexpected use of non-epichoric variants in stead of local forms in archaic and classical Attic poetic genres, i.e. tragedy, comedy, epigrams, and skolia. Specifically, it seeks to determine which factors influenced the choice of high-register non-epichoric forms with retained inherited /aː/, tradi tionally labeled as “Doric”, and/or forms with /εː/ of Ionic-epic origin over their local Attic counterparts. This study argues that the selection of these variants was in fluenced not only by the linguistic features of each genre’s Kunstsprache, but also, and importantly, by the perception of both epichoric and non-epichoric forms. Such perception may have prevented the use of a local form, while it favoured the selec tion of its non-epichoric and high-register counterpart, either Ionic-epic or lyric de pending again on genre and perception. For reasons of space, the paper focuses on the variants of Athena’s name, i.e. Attic Ἀθηναία, Ἀθηνᾶ; Ionic and epic Ἀθήνη, Ἀθη ναίη; “/aː/ Dialekte” and lyric Ἀθάνα, Ἀθαναία in Attic tragedy, comedy, epigrams, and skolia.