Expert: Maria - 12/6/2007

Question
Hello Maria,
You answered a question (I am pasting it here below) from someone named Leslie that made reference to a figurine that she has which is a man with a beard and the name EOKPATHE. I have that same statue and I can assure you, that is the name printed on the base. The only thing that she left out of her description is that the "O" has a line under it and I am unable to duplicate that on the keyboard.
No one here at work can remember where this came from or how long it's been sitting on a colleague's desk. But it is the head of a man with a full beard and mustache, two horizontal lines in his forehead and the word EOKPATHE etched intio the base. The statue itself appears to be made of wood. Any help you could give us would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance...

Thomas C. Williams



Hello Leslie,

Actually I think that the name EOKPATHE, which seems to be in ancient Greek, is wrong as it does not exist in Greek (nor in Latin, however).
In ancient Greek there is only one name that looks like this a little bit, i.e. EUKRATES, but this name is very seldom mentioned as he is not an important man.

Finally, in the light of what you said, i.e. that the man is seated and is an old man, I could think that the name is SOKRATEI, that is the dative case of SOKRATES which is the name of the ancient Greek philosopher.

All the best
Maria


Answer
Hello Tommy,

the word EOKPATHE, where the "O" has a line under it,  seems to be written with an omega instead of an omicron, but this detail unfortunately does not appear to solve the problem of this term composed by the ancient Greek capital letters EPSILON-OMEGA-KAPPA-RHO-ALPHA-TAU-ETA-EPSILON,  unless the last letter is a capital SIGMA which is quite  similar to the  E (epsilon).
[See the Greek alphabet at : http://www.dur.ac.uk/stat.web/greek.htm].

In this case the word would be in Latin transliteration “Eokrates” which sounds quite similar to “Eukrates”, an ancient Greek masculine name we read in Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, book III, chapter 41.

In any case the name “Eokrates” does not exist in ancient Greek which is also one of my fields of expertise.

Maybe you should ask an expert in Modern Greek which is different from the ancient one either in spelling or in pronunciation.

Good luck!
Maria