One thing that has popped up in my consciousness over the years is that we often don’t appreciate the significance of names in history, mostly because we’ve been too heavily influenced by one individual who has that name. Because of their importance, they dominate the landscape, and block our view of what they themselves had seen.
To illustrate what I mean, consider a case where the person hadn’t become important – the case of Arthur, Prince of Wales, the son of Henry VII of England. He’s become sort of a footnote in history, because he died young, before he could attain the throne. If Americans know him at all, it’s because he married Catherine of Aragon, and his brother Henry VIII’s interaction with all of that lead to the breaking away of the Church of England.
That wouldn’t have happened had Arthur lived – the circumstances wouldn’t have arisen, and British history would’ve been very different. But, besides there not being a tussle with the Catholic Church, there was something else – Arthur, by his name alone, evoked the legendary King Arthur, and he would have been a second Arthur (would he have been called “Arthur II”? Doubtful, but people would have thought about it.) Arthur’s name was a conscious decision to strengthen the claims of the Tudors (which was still a pretty new “house”). Henry VII deliberately had his birth at Winchester, at the time associated with Camelot.
We don’t think about the Tudor King Arthur when we hear about “King Arthur”, but that’s only because Arthur Tudor died of “sweating sickness”.
But our attention was diverted in other cases:
Cleopatra – Admit it – you immediately thought of the Queen of Egypt who dallied with Caesar and Marc Antony, famously portrayed by Liz Taylor (among others). But in her time, “Cleopatra” was a HIstoricName. The name isn’t Egyptian at all, but Greek, meaning “Glory of the Father”. She was the wife of King Meleager in The Iliad. “Cleopatra” was also the name of the mother of King Idomeneos of Crete, and another Cleopatra was the sister of Alexander the Great. And there are at least four other mythological characters named “Cleopatra”, and several other, lesser-known queens. But in her time someone saying “cleopatra” might as easily be referring to the character from the Iliad or to Alexander the Great’s sister.
Brutus – not the alternative name of Popeye’s nemesis, but Marcus Junius Brutus, the guy who stabbed Julius Caesar and who pop culture thinks of being addressed by Caesar with the words “Et to, Brute?” (although that comes from Elizabethan plays, not any historical report).
What most of us don’t appreciate today is that Brutus was from a long line of Romans who traced their ancestry back to Lucius Junius Brutus, who was supposed to have overthrown Tarquinus Superbus, the Last King of Rome. To him, THIS was the Famous Brutus, and he might have felt himself inspired by the example of his ancestor who had put away an absolute ruler and saved a republic.
Jesus – from Yeshua or Yehoshua. It’s the same name as Joshua, and the most famous of that name was Moses’ military right-hand man, and who git his own book in the Old Testament. Even written in its Greek form as “Jesus” there was preceding the famous one Jesus ben Sirach, the author of the Book of Ecclesiasticus (not to be confused with Ecclesiastes)