Divine Names Under a Multifocal Lens

The past three decades have witnessed a renewed interest in divine onomastics across the ancient Mediterranean.Divine names are a privileged entry point for investigating the construction and functioning of polytheistic systems.The proliferation of digital corpora -DEPHis (Divine Epithets in Hispania), SIRAR (Sylloge Inscriptionum Religionis Africae Romanae) and the vast database of the ERC Project MAP (Mapping Ancient Polytheisms)has vastly expanded the base for analysis, enabling detailed local and broad comparative studies.The volumes under reviewthe English translation of a wide-ranging miscellany (Bonnet), a focused monograph (Kajava) and the proceedings of a major workshop (Palamidis and Bonnet)reflect the current state of scholarship, but also push its boundaries, questioning inherited taxonomies, foregrounding human agency and exploring the pragmatic dimensions of naming the divine.I will engage with these multifaceted materials through my disciplinary lens: the linguistic approach, relatively underrepresented in the three volumes, can offer cross-cutting readings and expand the range of disciplinary perspectives on religious onomastics.Rigid dichotomies between theonym and epithet and between literary epithet and cultic epiclesis (still explicit in N. Belayche et al. edd.,Nommer les dieux.Thonymes, pithtes, piclses dans l'Antiquit 2005; cf. the notion of 'cultic double name': R. Parker, Greek Gods Abroad.Names, Natures, and Transformations 2017, pp.1-31) prove to be unsatisfactory when dealing with heterogeneous material.A broader categoryonomastic sequence/formula, a sense unit formed by combining onomastic attributesproves more effective (C.