Divine Anthropophoric Epicleses in the Hellenistic Period. Exploring the Entanglement Between Dedicatory and Honorific Practice

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate at the center of this volume by offering a few general considerations about the context of use and the meaning of divine epicleses built upon human personal names as they are attested by the Greek evidence from the Hellenistic period. I focus on the methodological questions and issues raised when we consider the relevant evidence from the perspective of the encounters and mutual influences between Greek religion and cultic honors for human beings in the Hellenistic period. The paper has five sections. In the first, I briefly review the scanty sources concerning anthropophoric epicleses of Greek gods from the late Classical and Hellenistic periods. I then contextualize the evidence within the framework of cultic denominations of ritually honored Hellenistic rulers. From this perspective, anthropophoric epicleses attributed to Greek gods can be seen as one component of a broader linguistic system in which epithets articulate and express the ritual encounter between a human honorandus and the divine sphere. In the third section, I focus on the interactions between cultic honors and the Greek epicletic tradition, showing that anthropophoric epicleses built upon royal names were modeled after theophoric epicleses (e.g., Zeus Heraios / Aphrodisios or Athena / Aphrodite Areia, etc.) used in Greek dedications to specify the sphere of action of the first deity in relation to the second. Section four attempts to reach a better understanding of the role of anthropophoric epicleses in the construction of the religious figure of honored rulers by comparing them with other media, in particular with iconographic supports. The final section deals with the question of why denominations of the type Zeus Philippios / Aphrodite Stratonikis did not become more successful, in comparison to other epicletic strategies, when it came to expressing the encounter between Hellenistic kings and the divine.