---
deposit_number: 1762
hex: 0C74
title: "The Crossing of Names: History, Allegory, and the Binding of the Ancient Literary Field"
creator: Sharks, Lee
orcid: 0009-0000-1599-0703
date: 2026-11-12
content_type: Theoretical paper
license: CC-BY-4.0
substrate: AI-assisted (substrate). By Lee Sharks. Draft 0.2 was prepared by ChatGPT under the author's direction from the conversation and a saved research checkpoint. Drafts 0.3–0.8 were prepared by Claude (Anthropic) under the author's direction, with reviews by DeepSeek and ChatGPT checked against the texts before entry.
version: v1.0
related_ids: "#1761 (The Word That Became Text v2.0); #626 (its version 1.0); #1760 (EA-CORPORA-37, the seated Slavonic Josephus); #1758 (In the Midst of the Seven); #1576 (Many and One); #1583 (Aristotelian or Theophrastan); #1588 (Aristotle and Theophrastus ≠ Two Distinct Authors); #1593 (Measuring the Operation, Not the Name); #1602 (Locating the Dependencies); #1605 (The First Draft); #1754 (Socrates as Orthonym)"
axn_schema_version: v2
protocol_version: alexanarch-deposit-protocol/v1
keywords:
  - names
  - naming
  - πολυώνυμος
  - many-named
  - restamping
  - μεταχαράττειν
  - heteronymy
  - Lesbia
  - Clodia
  - Catullus 51
  - si fas est
  - Sappho 31
  - Cicero
  - De domo sua
  - Philo
  - De mutatione nominum
  - mirror of names
  - "Revelation 2:17"
  - "Revelation 3:12"
  - "Revelation 19:12"
  - Gellius
  - Apuleius
  - Josephus
  - Testimonium Flavianum
  - Slavonic Josephus
  - Acta Pilati
  - Whiston
  - author boundary
  - Historical Logos
---

# The Crossing of Names: History, Allegory, and the Binding of the Ancient Literary Field

# The Crossing of Names
## History, Allegory, and the Binding of the Ancient Literary Field

**Lee Sharks · v1.0 · 12 November 2026**

*Version 1.0, deposited 12 November 2026, is draft 0.8. The notes below record the drafts. Draft 0.8 traces the archive's *ei exestin* to Whiston's "if it be lawful" (§6). Draft 0.7 checks the *Acta Pilati* Greek against Tischendorf's printed page. It sets the Slavonic mirror in the text's own order, with Catullus's *si fas est* parsed as parenthetical to *videtur* (§6). Draft 0.6 is a developmental pass on ChatGPT's review of v0.4, each point checked against the texts. It separates three operations under the πολυώνυμος term (§1). It argues the identification of Revelation's three names from the text's own titles (§5). It distinguishes Gellius's banquet (19.9) from the Plato epigram two chapters on (19.11), and finds the link between them in a second soul that leaves its lover. It adds Philo's "mirror of names" in Eusebius's copy (§4). It states the Slavonic mirror on the author's reading: flesh into word in Catullus, word into flesh in the Slavonic (§6). Draft 0.5 brings the cross-references into line with §6 (§9b, the evidence map, note 17), adds the second Greek recension of the *Acta Pilati* to §6's witnesses, points to the archive's reading of the Slavonic passage as a mirror of Catullus 51, and reads Revelation's withheld-name formula as the model for a cross-corpus seam (§9b). Draft 0.4 takes πολυώνυμος, many-named, as the essay's term; sets Revelation's withheld-name formula at the centre of §5; reads Philo's renaming as restamping and carries the figure to Cicero's statue; reads Gellius 19.9 as the dossier in one scene; joins Apuleius and Gellius to the author-boundary question; adds the Acta Pilati and the Slavonic *War* to §7; and compresses §9a. Draft 0.3 set the original language beside every primary locus the essay reads, from the archive's seated texts where the archive holds them and from open editions where it does not; the witness for each is given in the Original-language ledger at the end. It closes the Catullus–Josephus witness alignment that v0.2 left open (§6). Draft 0.2 developed the author-boundary question through the archive's Plato–Aristotle and Aristotle–Theophrastus investigations: the separations, functional seams, stopping rule, stylometric controls, dependency protocol, and symmetric evaluation. It carries the current one-self-dividing-maker hypothesis while preserving the earlier records' own dated claims.*

## Abstract

Names bind texts by crossing. A name can identify a person while also installing a speaking position, carrying an earlier text, assigning an office, or making a claim to divine and political authority. This essay proposes that the patterned crossing of these functions is a binding literary operation across a field provisionally assembled from Catullus, Cicero, Philo, Josephus, the Apocalypse, and selected later receptions. Its term is Philo's: πολυώνυμος, many-named, the word he gives both to Moses and to the Logos. The question is how systematically that field organizes the reader's passage between historical reference and allegorical recognition. Close reading supplies the first evidence: an enacted transformation is more directly inspectable than a biography reconstructed from the text that performs it. Alternative identity maps become inventories of proposed crossings, to be tested at the level of their constituent relations. Scholarship on poetic naming, allegory, figural interpretation, historiography, and textual identity provides a substantial interlocutory landscape. The study follows what the texts visibly make, and asks how those constructions become the persons, pedigrees, and authoritative past through which the texts themselves are subsequently classified.

## 1. A name is an operation

The first temptation is to ask who everyone really was. The more consequential question is what the writing does with the possibility of knowing.

A historical identification promises to stop interpretation: this name belongs to that person, this event occurred then, and the passage can be returned to its place. Yet the texts repeatedly make a name do more than identify. They make it remember another text, gather attributes, change a person's condition, stage an ancestor's return, or transfer an authority. An identification may be correct while leaving that operation almost entirely unread.

The present claim is stronger than the observation that ancient writers used pseudonyms or allegory. It proposes that **the organized crossing of names helps bind the literary field itself**. A figure acquires sufficient particularity to be recognized, then crosses into another register without losing everything that made recognition possible. Historical reference gives the crossing purchase. Allegorical transformation gives it a second life. The reader's difficulty in settling the relation can be an effect of the composition.

The field has a word for the figure it keeps producing. Philo calls Moses "πολυώνυμον", the prophet named by what he does (*De mutatione nominum* 125), and calls the Logos "πολυώνυμον" too, "ἀρχὴ καὶ ὄνομα θεοῦ καὶ λόγος καὶ ὁ κατ’ εἰκόνα ἄνθρωπος καὶ ὁ ὁρῶν, Ἰσραήλ" (*De confusione linguarum* 146). Revelation names the rider "Ὁ Λόγος τοῦ Θεοῦ" and gives him a name no one knows (19:12–13). A many-named figure is one referent gathering several designations. This essay calls it by Philo's word, and keeps the word to that operation. Two others work with it, and the essay studies all three:

| Operation | What it does | Example in the dossier |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Many-namedness, πολυώνυμος | Several designations gather around one referent | Philo's Moses and Logos; Revelation's rider, "Faithful and True", "the Word of God", a name no one knows |
| Transfer or restamping, μεταχαράττειν | A designation or an authority moves to a changed referent | Hosea restamped as Joshua; the Liberty on Cicero's site; Berenice to Veronica |
| Differentiated personation | Named positions acquire distinct capacities and consequences | Lesbia as beloved and as Sappho's voice; the victor who receives the rider's name |

A designation can name an attribute without becoming a position, so many-namedness alone does not make a person. One designation can also pass across several persons or objects, which many-namedness does not describe. The larger argument is the interaction of the three: names gather, move, and harden into persons who can act.

This proposition requires a defined field. “Ancient literature” is too large to serve as an unexamined unit. Our initial dossier brings together texts through specific joins: Sapphic reception in Catullus; the Claudian names in poetry and forensic speech; Philo's explicit treatment of names and persons; Josephan authorization of historical writing; the Apocalypse's declared plurality of names and referents; and later narratives that redistribute named figures. Their inclusion is a research decision, justified and revisable passage by passage. The pattern cannot be established by collecting only works already selected for apparent agreement.

The crossing also binds a reader to a practice. A recognizable figure invites identification, but the relations attached to the figure exceed the identification that first made it available. Reading has to return, compare, and revise. If this movement recurs with sufficient constraint across texts, uncertainty is a positive part of their organization: the reader is being taught to hold several kinds of relation together. The system would impoverish itself if every encounter ended in the replacement of a literary name by a biographical one.

The evidentiary priority is nevertheless clear. Where a text openly performs a crossing, the crossing is available for inspection. A recovered biography built from that performance is an inference. The latter cannot silently become the court of appeal against the former.

## 2. Lesbia: a beloved who carries another poet

Apuleius supplies an ancient list of substitutions in *Apology* 10: Lesbia for Clodia, Perilla for Metella, Cynthia for Hostia, and Delia for Plania. The list occurs in his defense of his own practice of naming poetic beloveds. It is testimony with an argumentative occasion, and it gives no unmediated access to the earlier poets' lives. The sentence names Clodia; the more specific identification as Clodia Metelli requires additional evidence: "eadem igitur opera accusent C. Catullum, quod Lesbiam pro Clodia nominarit, et Ticidam similiter, quod quae Metella erat Perillam scripserit, et Propertium, qui Cunthiam dicat, Hostiam dissimulet, et Tibullum, quod ei sit Plania in animo, Delia in uersu."[1] The same chapter then defends erotic verse by a philosopher's example and quotes epigrams it gives to "Platonis philosophi", the first beginning "ἀστὴρ πρὶν μὲν ἔλαμπες". The chapter that decodes Lesbia also files erotic poems under Plato's name.

The list is also evidence that a mapping can circulate as a recognizable piece of literary knowledge. Its historical accuracy and its function in Apuleius's defense are separate questions. Even an accurate decoding leaves the poetic name's work to be explained.

In Catullus 51 the Sapphic situation is rewritten in Latin, and the name Lesbia enters the address. Sappho's first line, "φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν", becomes "Ille mi par esse deo videtur, / ille, si fas est, superare divos" (51.1–2); the name enters at 51.7, "nam simul te, / Lesbia, adspexi". The ending then addresses Catullus: "otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est" (51.13). The composition distributes recognition across an inherited scene, a newly named addressee, and a named self addressed within the poem. *Si fas est* places the escalation beyond divine equality under an expressed qualification. These are observable arrangements of the received text.[2]

Lesbia's connection to Lesbos makes the name more than a removable cover. On the reading developed here, the beloved carries an allusive relation to the poetry through which she is addressed. Replacing Lesbia with Clodia may clarify a historical proposal while obscuring the poem's means of making its beloved legible. A person can receive a literary name that also changes the conditions under which she is encountered.

Catullus 16 makes the passage from verse to person itself an issue: "qui me ex versiculis meis putastis, / quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum. / nam castum esse decet pium poetam / ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est" (16.3–6). Its speaker contests an inference from the poems to the poet's sexual character while answering with a performance of sexual aggression. The distinction is enacted inside a speaking voice whose own relation to the maker remains something to read.[3] Catullus 79, with Lesbia, Lesbius, and *pulcer*, provides a further locus where naming and insinuation work together: "Lesbius est pulcher: quid ni? quem Lesbia malit / quam te cum tota gente, Catulle, tua" (79.1–2).[4] *Pulcher* is the cognomen of Clodius; the line names the brother by an adjective and the sister by a poem.

The local claim is therefore concrete: these poems make the relation between name, speaking position, and embodied person part of their activity. A biographical reading must account for that activity before it can use the poems as evidence.

## 2a. A changed body, a speaking fragment, a voice received

The longer poems extend the question beyond a substituted personal name. In Catullus 63, Attis's bodily transformation is accompanied by shifts in gendered grammatical description: the participle turns feminine after the act ("niveis citata cepit manibus leve typanum", 63.8), Attis is "notha mulier" (63.27), says "ego mulier, ego adulescens, ego ephebus, ego puer" (63.63), and ends "famula" (63.90). The retained name carries a subject whose relation to the body and its former life has changed.[30] The continuity of a label cannot be equated with an unchanged ontology.

In poem 66, a lock of Berenice's hair speaks as the fragment removed from a royal body and placed among the stars: "idem me ille Conon caelesti in lumine vidit / e Bereniceo vertice caesariem" (66.7–8); "invita, o regina, tuo de vertice cessi" (66.39).[31] A material part becomes a first-person speaker through the poem. This Berenice is Ptolemaic Berenice II, distinct from the Herodian woman discussed below. Keeping them distinct permits a more exact comparison: how does writing give a royal woman, her body, or a fragment of it a transmissible celestial and political presence?

The erotic poems also make sacred obligation internal to their relations. Poem 76 invokes fidelity, covenant, purity, and divine assistance: "cum se cogitat esse pium, / nec sanctam violasse fidem, nec foedere in ullo / divum ad fallendos numine abusum homines" (76.2–4). Poem 109 asks the gods to make possible a sincere promise and a lasting sacred bond of friendship: "di magni, facite ut vere promittere possit … ut liceat nobis tota perducere vita / aeternum hoc sanctae foedus amicitiae" (109.3–6).[32] The permission verb *liceat* stands beside the *fas* of 51.2 as the poet's second idiom of the allowed. Their language supplies a concrete dossier for asking how erotic address crosses into ethical and theological construction. Such an inquiry can proceed without deciding that the beloved is secretly one later religious figure.

Gellius preserves a setting in which several of these lines of inquiry meet. *Attic Nights* 19.9 places Sapphic performance, a discussion naming Catullus, and older Latin erotic verse within a single narrated gathering. The boys and girls sing "Ἀνακρεόντεια pleraque et Sapphica" (19.9.4); the Greeks allow the Latins only "Catullus … forte pauca et Calvus itidem pauca" (19.9.7); and Julianus covers his head in an expressly Socratic precedent before performing: "permittite mihi, quaeso, operire pallio caput, quod in quadam parum pudica oratione Socraten fecisse aiunt" (19.9.9). *Parum pudica* is Catullus 16's phrase for the verses. The first Latin poem he sings, Valerius Aedituus's "Dicere cum conor curam tibi, Pamphila, cordis, / … verba labris abeunt, / per pectus manat subito subido mihi sudor" (19.9.11), is a Latin Sappho 31. At 19.11 an epigram attributed to Plato, "Τὴν ψυχὴν Ἀγάθωνα φιλῶν ἐπὶ χείλεσιν ἔσχον", is followed by a freer Latin version made by Gellius's friend, which ends "Ut fierem ad me mortuus, / Ad puerum ut intus viverem": a lover dead to himself and living inside another.[33] Attribution, embodied imitation, performance, and translation already circulate together in this witness. A later reader receives an organized scene of literary relations. The banquet of 19.9 is the dossier in one scene: Sapphic song, Catullus named, Socrates veiled, and a Latin poem in Sappho 31's symptoms. The Plato epigram is not in that scene. Chapter 19.10 intervenes, with Fronto, his builders and a grammatical question about *praeterpropter*, and the epigram comes at 19.11 as a notice of its own. The book makes two arrangements: a gathering the narrator stages, and a relation assembled across chapters.

The relation across chapters has a hinge in the words. The Greeks allow the Latins only "Catullus … forte pauca". Julianus answers with poets older than "eos quos nominastis", the ones you named, and the last of them is Quintus Catulus, a name one letter from Catullus's. Catulus's poem is about a soul that leaves its lover: "Aufugit mi animus; credo, ut solet, ad Theotimum / devenit", my soul has run off; I think it has gone, as usual, to Theotimus (19.9.14). The Plato epigram two chapters on has the same soul: "Τὴν ψυχὴν Ἀγάθωνα φιλῶν ἐπὶ χείλεσιν ἔσχον", kissing Agathon I had my soul at my lips. Its Latin version ends with a lover living inside the beloved (19.11). The name the Greeks give, Catullus, is answered by a near-name, Catulus, and the near-name's poem is answered by Plato's. Names cross inside the witness, and the crossing runs across chapters the narrator keeps apart.

## 3. Clodia: an ancestor can speak, a goddess can be renamed

The Clodia dossier joins poetry to a public contest over reputation and admissible authority. In *Pro Caelio* 33–36, Cicero announces a choice of manner, brings a dead Claudian ancestor into speech ("exsistat igitur ex hac ipsa familia aliquis ac potissimum Caecus ille", 33), lets him speak ("mulier, quid tibi cum Caelio, quid cum homine adulescentulo, quid cum alieno?"; "ideone ego pacem Pyrrhi diremi ut tu amorum turpissimorum cotidie foedera ferires", 34), and then substitutes the voice of Clodius ("eum putato tecum loqui: quid tumultuaris, soror? quid insanis?", 36). He controls both performances. The family appears to judge its member through voices composed by her opponent.[5]

This is an especially inspectable crossing. We can see the advocate allocate speech to another name and use the allocation to exert pressure on a living person. The old family's authority is made present as a rhetorical event. The question “did the ancestor really say this?” would miss the declared procedure. A more useful question is what becomes possible when Cicero makes him say it.

*De Domo Sua* 110–112 supplies a related contest at the level of an object. Cicero challenges the Liberty installed at the site of his demolished house ("libertas, inquit, est", 110) by alleging that the statue had represented a courtesan at Tanagra: "Tanagraea quaedam meretrix fuisse dicitur. eius non longe a Tanagra simulacrum e marmore in sepulcro positum fuit" (111); "hanc deam quisquam violare audeat, imaginem meretricis, ornamentum sepulcri, a fure sublatam, a sacrilego conlocatam?" (112). His allegation seeks to reverse the statue's sacred identity and the authority attached to its installation.[6] We need not accept its alleged provenance to observe the act of competing designation. Philo has a word for the act: renaming as restamping, μεταχαράττειν, the coiner's verb (*De mutatione nominum* 121, 123). Cicero's Liberty is a stamped image claimed for a new name, and his speech tries to strike it back to the old one. “Courtesan” and “Liberty” organize opposed claims over the same image and place.

Together these passages show why the history–allegory relation has material stakes. A speaking ancestor and a personified Liberty can participate in litigation, property, and political memory. Their literary construction does not make their effects unreal. Conversely, those effects do not certify every narrative told to produce them.

The comparison with Josephus's Berenice should begin at this level. *Antiquities* 20.145–146 reports an incest allegation and presents her marriage to Polemon as an attempt to counter it: "φήμης ἐπισχούσης, ὅτι τἀδελφῷ συνείη, πείθει Πολέμωνα … περιτεμόμενον ἀγαγέσθαι πρὸς γάμον αὐτήν· οὕτως γὰρ ἐλέγξειν ᾤετο ψευδεῖς τὰς διαβολάς". The narrative also makes wealth and the marriage's failure consequential: "ὁ Πολέμων ἐπείσθη μάλιστα διὰ τὸν πλοῦτον αὐτῆς … ἡ Βερενίκη διʼ ἀκολασίαν, ὡς ἔφασαν, καταλείπει τὸν Πολέμωνα".[7] Both charges come as report, φήμη and ὡς ἔφασαν: the same standing as the rumour Cicero manages for Clodia. Read beside Clodia, the passage opens a study of how sexual accusation, kinship, and resources organize a woman's public standing. That arrangement is available for comparison before a proposed identity between the women is decided.

## 3a. A shared world has named points of contact

These materials also occupy connected political worlds. In *Atticus* 2.9, Cicero writes of Clodia through Hera's Homeric epithet, "quem illa βοῶπις … ad te est relatura"; gives Pompey a Jerusalem-related epithet, "hic noster Hierosolymarius"; complains of those "qui regna qui praedia tetrarchis … dederunt"; and invokes Theophrastus, "nihil me existimaris neque usu neque a Theophrasto didicisse" (2.9.1–2).[34] βοῶπις is the epithet itself, in Greek, inside a Latin letter; the edition's "Juno" is its decoding. Its compressed mixture of classical allusion and contemporary power supplies a local example of crossed registers in correspondence. *Pro Flacco* 66–69 puts Jerusalem's gold remittances and Roman control of them inside forensic advocacy: "cum aurum Iudaeorum nomine quotannis ex Italia et ex omnibus nostris provinciis Hierosolymam exportari soleret, Flaccus sanxit edicto ne ex Asia exportari liceret" (67); "sua cuique civitati religio, Laeli, est, nostra nobis" (69).[35] The gold travels "Iudaeorum nomine", under the Jews' name. The material movement of money enters the same public culture in which sacred and ethnic designations are contested.

Josephus provides a more specific familial connection: Philo is Alexander the alabarch's brother, "Φίλων ὁ προεστὼς τῶν Ἰουδαίων τῆς πρεσβείας … Ἀλεξάνδρου τε τοῦ ἀλαβάρχου ἀδελφὸς ὢν καὶ φιλοσοφίας οὐκ ἄπειρος" (18.259), and Alexander's son marries Berenice, "καὶ αὐτοῦ υἱὸς Βερενίκην τὴν Ἀγρίππου γαμεῖ θυγατέρα" (19.276).[36] In the autobiography fragments of Nicolaus, rhetoric, history-writing, and diplomatic mediation belong to his relationship with Herod and the Roman court. The king first compels his historian to practise rhetoric with him, then takes up a desire for history, "ἐπαινέσαντος Νικολάου τὸ πρᾶγμα καὶ πολιτικώτατον εἶναι λέγοντος, χρήσιμον δὲ καὶ βασιλεῖ", and urges Nicolaus to write it (FHG III fr. 4, p. 350).[37] A king commissions the history that will authorize him. These are narrated points of contact, to be evaluated as such. They give the proposed field identifiable pathways and institutions without making a literary dependency follow automatically from a social connection.

## 4. Philo: naming changes what a person is

Philo gives the inquiry an explicit theory. In *On the Change of Names* 65–71, names function as perceptible marks of powers, "χαρακτῆρες δυνάμεών εἰσι, βραχεῖς μεγάλων, αἰσθητοὶ νοητῶν, φανεροὶ ἀδήλων" (65), and renaming is read as a correction of character through symbols: "μηκέτ’ οὖν ὀνομάτων ἀλλαγὴν ὑπολάβῃς χαρίζεσθαι τὸ θεῖον, ἀλλὰ διὰ συμβόλων ἠθῶν ἐπανόρθωσιν" (70). In 121–128, Hosea's change to Joshua marks a transformation in condition, and the new name is Ἰησοῦς: "τὸν Ὠσηὲ μετονομάζει Μωυσῆς εἰς τὸν Ἰησοῦν, τὸν ποιὸν εἰς ἕξιν μεταχαράττων. Ὠσηὲ μὲν γὰρ ἑρμηνεύεται ποιὸς οὗτος, Ἰησοῦς δὲ σωτηρία κυρίου, ἕξεως ὄνομα τῆς ἀρίστης" (121). The verb is a coiner's, μεταχαράττων, restamping, and 123 carries the figure on: "οὕτω μετεχαράχθη καὶ τὸ τοῦ λεχθέντος νόμισμα". Moses receives different designations according to his activity: "Τὸν δὲ ἀρχιπροφήτην συμβέβηκεν εἶναι πολυώνυμον" (125). These are Philo's interpretive explanations, including his etymologies; this essay reports them and certifies none.[8]

A name here can designate the state a life realizes. Its meaning is neither exhausted by a civil identity nor detached from how a person acts. The textual person is differentiated by operations whose achievement gives the designation its force.

*On the Cherubim* 40–52 extends the field through generation and discipleship. The wives are interpreted as virtues, and divine generation is distinguished from ordinary human generation. At 49 Philo describes his initiation by Moses and subsequent discipleship to Jeremiah: "καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼ παρὰ Μωυσεῖ τῷ θεοφιλεῖ μυηθεὶς τὰ μεγάλα μυστήρια ὅμως αὖθις Ἱερεμίαν τὸν προφήτην ἰδὼν … οὐκ ὤκνησα φοιτῆσαι πρὸς αὐτόν". The chronology of a modern classroom cannot contain this relation: the text makes earlier figures present as teachers through its account of reading and initiation.[9]

In *On the Confusion of Tongues* 146–149, the Logos receives several names, "τὸν πρωτόγονον αὐτοῦ λόγον, τὸν ἀγγέλων πρεσβύτατον, ὡς ἂν ἀρχάγγελον, πολυώνυμον ὑπάρχοντα· καὶ γὰρ ἀρχὴ καὶ ὄνομα θεοῦ καὶ λόγος καὶ ὁ κατ’ εἰκόνα ἄνθρωπος καὶ ὁ ὁρῶν, Ἰσραήλ, προσαγορεύεται" (146), and descendants of David are explained through the generation of virtuous souls rather than bodily descent.[10] The Logos is πολυώνυμος as Moses is (*Mut.* 125): the same word for the prophet and the Word. A genealogy can therefore be a claim about an achieved relation as well as a claim about birth. The reader must determine which relation a particular passage constructs.

Philo also has a figure for reading names as a person reads a face. The Therapeutae, he says, take the whole law to be like a living creature: "σῶμα μὲν ἔχειν τὰς ῥητὰς διατάξεις, ψυχὴν δὲ τὸν ἐναποκείμενον ταῖς λέξεσιν ἀόρατον νοῦν", with the literal ordinances for its body and for its soul the invisible mind laid up in the words. The soul that reads beholds that mind "ὥσπερ διὰ κατόπτρου τῶν ὀνομάτων", as through a mirror of names (*De vita contemplativa* 78). Eusebius copies the passage into the *Church History* and reads the body as "τὰς ῥητὰς λέξεις", the literal words (2.17.20).[49] Names are the mirror in which a text's hidden person is seen, and in the Christian copy the text's body is its words.

This gives the wider investigation a crucial distinction. A recovered alias maps a second label onto a supposedly stable person. Philo also makes names articulate a transformation of the person, a plurality of functions, or a transmissible condition. An alias table can miss the very ontology that makes the naming intelligible.

The archive's *In the Midst of the Seven*, by Johannes Sigil and Damascus Dancings, develops the related sequence of naming, impression, embodiment, and transmission across Philo and Revelation. That work carefully distinguishes its construction from an explicit sentence of identity in Philo.[11] The distinction matters here: a sequence assembled by analysis must remain distinguishable from a proposition stated by its source.

## 5. Revelation: disclosure includes the withholding of a name

The Apocalypse makes layered reference explicit. Revelation 11:8 calls the great city spiritually Sodom and Egypt while locating there the crucifixion of the witnesses' Lord: "τῆς πόλεως τῆς μεγάλης, ἥτις καλεῖται πνευματικῶς Σόδομα καὶ Αἴγυπτος, ὅπου καὶ ὁ Κύριος αὐτῶν ἐσταυρώθη". Several designations coexist within one sentence. Its adverb marks the crossing; the geographical names carry a judgment as well as possible historical orientation.[12]

Revelation 17:9–10 offers a further structure: the heads are interpreted as mountains and kings, "αἱ ἑπτὰ κεφαλαὶ ἑπτὰ ὄρη εἰσίν, ὅπου ἡ γυνὴ κάθηται ἐπ’ αὐτῶν. καὶ βασιλεῖς ἑπτά εἰσιν· οἱ πέντε ἔπεσαν, ὁ εἷς ἔστιν, ὁ ἄλλος οὔπω ἦλθεν". Interpretation increases the available relations, and the image survives its interpretation.[13] The creature, topography, and rule remain jointly available to the reader.

The rider of Revelation 19 has a name known only to himself, "ἔχων ὄνομα γεγραμμένον ὃ οὐδεὶς οἶδεν εἰ μὴ αὐτός", and is also named the Word of God in the following verse, "καὶ κέκληται τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ὁ Λόγος τοῦ Θεοῦ".[14] A disclosed designation therefore coexists with a withheld name. Revelation 2:17 similarly promises a written new name known to its receiver, in the same formula: "ὄνομα καινὸν γεγραμμένον, ὃ οὐδεὶς οἶδεν εἰ μὴ ὁ λαμβάνων".[15] At 3:12 the speaker writes on the victor "τὸ ὄνομά μου τὸ καινόν", my new name. The withheld name of the rider and the withheld name of the victor are written in one formula, and the third passage gives the one to the other. What the text states and what the reading joins have to be kept apart.
   - The text states that the victor receives the speaker's new name (3:12).
   - It does not state that this new name is the name only the rider knows (19:12), or the name on the white stone (2:17). That identification is the reading, and it rests on three joins the text makes:
     - **The formula.** 2:17 and 19:12 share "ὄνομα … γεγραμμένον, ὃ οὐδεὶς οἶδεν εἰ μή", a written name that no one knows except, in one case "ὁ λαμβάνων", the receiver, and in the other "αὐτός", he himself.
     - **The adjective and the recipient.** 2:17 and 3:12 share καινόν, new, and the same recipient, ὁ νικῶν, the one who conquers.
     - **The speaker.** The speaker of 3:12 and the rider of 19:12 are made one by their titles and attributes. The speaker of the seventh letter is "ὁ μάρτυς ὁ πιστὸς καὶ ἀληθινός" (3:14), and the rider is "καλούμενος Πιστὸς καὶ Ἀληθινός" (19:11). The rider's "ὀφθαλμοὶ … φλὸξ πυρός" are those of the speaker of the letters (1:14, 2:18), and the sharp sword from his mouth is theirs (1:16, 2:12; 19:15).
   - What the rider does is also given to the victor in the same words: "ποιμανεῖ αὐτοὺς ἐν ῥάβδῳ σιδηρᾷ", he will shepherd them with a rod of iron, is promised to the one who conquers (2:27) and done by the rider (19:15).

On those joins the reading holds. The many-named Word has a name only he knows. The one who conquers receives the speaker's new name, written, and known only to the one who receives it. The identity becomes communicable while its recognition stays restricted. That is more than a concealed alias: the same name is given, and each holder knows it alone. The reader of Revelation is the end of its crossing. The writing distributes access to identity and makes that distribution part of its action.

These passages establish local design: their own language organizes several referential levels. The next question is how far comparable operations bind adjacent literature. Revelation makes a particularly strong point of entry because it repeatedly supplies instructions for the kind of recognition its reader must perform.

The larger question is what happens when a work's disclosed names become the historical identities through which later works are sorted. A later reader may encounter as biographical premise what an earlier composition made through an operation of naming. Tracing that possibility requires an account of transmission and direction, including places where the sequence cannot yet be decided.

## 6. Josephus: the archive authorizes persons, and persons authorize the archive

Josephus brings the inquiry into the institution of historical credibility. *Against Apion* 1.28–43 links priestly marriage and genealogical records to the preservation and authority of writing: the priest must father children "ἐξ ὁμοεθνοῦς γυναικὸς … τὸ γένος ἐξετάζειν ἐκ τῶν ἀρχαίων λαμβάνοντα τὴν διαδοχὴν καὶ πολλοὺς παρεχόμενον μάρτυρας" (1.31); writing was not open to all, "μήτε τὸ ὑπογράφειν αὐτεξουσίου πᾶσιν ὄντος", but to the prophets alone (1.37); and the books after Artaxerxes are not trusted alike "διὰ τὸ μὴ γενέσθαι τὴν τῶν προφητῶν ἀκριβῆ διαδοχήν" (1.41). Its account binds bodily succession, documentary custody, and qualified narration.[16] Read as an argument, it shows how a narrator constructs the conditions under which a history is to be believed.

This is consequential for our own use of metadata. A genealogy drawn from such a work may transmit historical information while also participating in the work's defense of the people and institutions that preserve it. Calling that defense interested does not decide its truth. It requires us to inspect the warrants; their form authenticates nothing.

The same book's discussion of the Hyksos shows the stakes of naming at another scale: competing explanations of a designation enter a contest over the identity and antiquity of a people (*Against Apion* 1.73–92).[16] The name is first parsed as "βασιλεῖς ποιμένες", shepherd kings, "τὸ γὰρ υκ καθʼ ἱερὰν γλῶσσαν βασιλέα σημαίνει" (1.82), and then, from another book of Manetho, as "ποιμένας αἰχμαλώτους", captive shepherds (1.91). Josephus, himself a captive, chooses between the two etymologies of his people's ancestors. Here naming is already historical argument. An etymology can be offered as a means of governing which past belongs to whom.

The Catullus–Josephus question that occasioned this dossier is a distinct join, and its witnesses can now be aligned. The archive checkpoint recorded that the *ei exestin* rendering lacked an identified witness. It has none: no Greek, Latin or Slavonic text carries it, and the archive's own correction is *The Word That Became Text* v2.0 (#1761), which withdraws the phrase; the errata on version 1.0 (#626) trace it to Whiston.[17] The witnesses that exist are these:

| Witness | Locus | Words present | Edition |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Sappho | fr. 31.1 | φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν | EA-CORPORA-01/10 |
| Catullus | 51.1–2 | Ille mi par esse deo videtur, / ille, si fas est, superare divos | Merrill 1893, EA-CORPORA-01/02 |
| Philo | *De vita Mosis* 2.135 | ἐξ ἀνθρώπου μεθηρμόσθαι καί, εἰ θέμις εἰπεῖν — θέμις δὲ ἀψευδεῖν περὶ ἀληθείας λέγοντα — | Cohn–Wendland, seated |
| Philo | *De mutatione nominum* 181 | τὸν ἄνθρωπον, εἰ θέμις εἰπεῖν, [θεόν] | Cohn–Wendland, seated; the final word is lost at a page break of the seated file and supplied |
| Josephus, Greek *Testimonium* | *Antiquities* 18.63 | Ἰησοῦς σοφὸς ἀνήρ, εἴγε ἄνδρα αὐτὸν λέγειν χρή | Niese, EA-CORPORA-01/01 |
| Josephus, Slavonic *War* | after 2.174 | Тогда явися мужь нѣкыи, и аще мужем достоино есть его нарещи … Тѣмь немощно ми есть нарещи его человѣком | Meshcherskii 1958, Vilna Chronograph, EA-CORPORA-37/01 |
| the same, German | Berendts–Grass 1926 | Damals erschien ein Mann, wenn es auch erlaubt ist, ihn einen Mann zu nennen | EA-CORPORA-37/02 |
| the same, English | Thackeray 1928 | At that time there appeared a man, if it is permissible to call him a man | EA-CORPORA-37/03 |
| *Acta Pilati*, second Greek recension | B XI, Joseph's lament | εἰ χρὴ μὲν καὶ ἄνθρωπον ὀνομάζειν σε, τὸν οἷα οὐδέποτε πεποίηκεν ἄνθρωπος θαύματα ἐργασάμενον | Tischendorf 1876, 314, checked against the printed page |

The alignment answers the question as v0.2 put it. The arrangement of appearance, a human predicate and qualified permission recurs in Sappho (appearance and equality with gods, no qualification), Catullus (appearance, excess over gods, *fas*), Philo (the human made more than human, θέμις), the Greek *Testimonium* (the human predicate qualified by χρή) and the Slavonic (the human predicate qualified by *dostoino*, "fitting", then withdrawn: "impossible for me to call him a man"). The qualifying words differ: *fas* and θέμις name divine law; χρή and *dostoino* name what is needful or fitting. The renderings "erlaubt" and "permissible" move the Slavonic toward *fas*. The archive's earlier *ei exestin* is Whiston's English put back into Greek. Version 1.0 of *The Word That Became Text* gives its English as "if it is lawful to call him man", and Whiston's *Testimonium* (1737) reads "if it be lawful to call him a man". The English Bible's "lawful" is ἔξεστιν. Whiston translated the Greek's χρή, and the phrase was then assigned to the Slavonic. ἔξεστι is Latin *licet*, Catullus's other idiom of the allowed (*liceat*, 109.5), and the phantom shows how a rendering can return as a source. The Testimonium's χρὴ λέγειν is Josephus's own hedge on a naming elsewhere: "εἴτε ὑπὸ τύχης χρὴ λέγειν, εἴτε ὑπὸ θεοῦ προνοίας" (*War* 3.391), "τὴν εἴτε ἀπόνοιαν εἴτε τῆς γνώμης ἰσχὺν χρὴ λέγειν" (*War* 7.417). The late Greek *Acta Pilati* puts the *Testimonium*'s χρή into Joseph of Arimathea's mouth over the body, with a verb of naming, ὀνομάζειν, where the Slavonic has *нарещи*; it is a witness to how the hedge was read, and probably knew the *Antiquities*. Literary analysis gains authority by exposing its joins; this one is now exposed at the level of the words.

The alignment also shows an order inside each passage. In Catullus, *si fas est* is parenthetical: *superare*, like *par esse*, depends on *videtur*. The hedge regulates the speaker's description at the instant before it says that a man who sits and looks and listens surpasses the gods. In the Slavonic a man appears, and the hedge stands at the instant before he is given "естьство и образ … человѣчьскъ", a human nature and form. Only after the narrator cannot call him a man does the text say that he did everything "словом", by word. Catullus calls himself, if the man is he, by Sappho's κῆνος. Read together, flesh becomes word in Catullus, and effective word acquires a human biography in the Slavonic. *The Word That Became Text* reads this as a precise mirror of Catullus 51, point by point and reversed in vector (#1761, Part II §V). That reading is made in its doctrinal register; this essay records the alignment it rests on, and the question of direction stays open (#1602).

The Slavonic *War* adds two crossings of its own. Its wonder-worker passage is headed, in the Vilna manuscript, "Иосиф о Христѣ пишет", Josephus writes of Christ: a rubric that names the author by naming his subject. And its Temple inscription calls Jesus "цесаря нецесарствовавша", a king who did not reign; Robert Eisler took that phrase back into Greek as the title of his book, ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣ ΟΥ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣΑΣ, and a phrase of the translation became the name of the thesis about it.[48]

Transmission can itself produce a crossing. A construction visible in a received version might belong to its translator, compiler, or reviser. The analysis must locate the transformation before assigning it to a first-century composer. A later crossing remains an object of literary history; its later location changes the genealogy of the operation.

## 7. What the alternative identity maps preserve

The nonmainstream mapping literature is useful because it collects proposed relations that can otherwise remain scattered. Its strongest contribution to this inquiry is a set of inspectable leads. Adopting one lead commits no one to the whole reconstruction.

| Proposed crossing | Observation to retain | Question requiring further evidence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Huller: Herodian Berenice through Veronica and Prunicus traditions | A dossier of names, royal associations, healing, and sacred images; the *Gospel of Nicodemus* separately attests Bernice/Beronice/Veronica forms for the healed woman | Which textual links connect those traditions, and which connect them specifically to the Herodian woman? |
| Carotta: Clodia's *quadrantaria* beside Mark's widow and *quadrans* | An explicit comparison with named classical and Gospel passages | Does the wider sequence establish a transformation, beyond the monetary term and an available ordinary explanation of it? |
| Eisenman: Paul within a Herodian political and familial configuration | A proposed comparison with Josephus's Saulus, his relationships, and political activity | Which features establish a shared social setting, and which discriminate an identification? |
| Reuchlin/Piso alias systems | A large inventory of asserted substitutions | Can each equation be supported independently of other equations whose truth the system presupposes? |
| *Acta Pilati* VII and *Antiquities* 4.219 | The woman named Bernice, Beronice and Veronica is refused as a witness by "Legem habemus mulierem ad testimonium non venire", a law first stated by Josephus | Which recension carries the refusal, and does the Greek *Acta* cite the law in Josephus's form? |

The first three proposals are documented in their authors' own presentations.[18–20] The Piso inventory and a detailed internal critique supply the fourth.[21] Lena Einhorn's comparison of Jesus with the Egyptian prophet and of John with Theudas adds a different kind of mapping: a proposed chronological displacement tested through a cluster of events and officeholders.[38] Its systematic ambition lies in the sequence it attempts to explain, and the sequence can be evaluated independently of accepting the proposed displacement.

The table preserves an important distinction between a textual relation and a historical equation. In *Gospel of Nicodemus* VII, James's presentation records Bernice, Coptic Beronice, and Latin Veronica.[22] Tischendorf's apparatus to the Greek *Acta Pilati* gives "ὄνομα Βερνίκη" in A and C and "ὀνόματι Βερονίκη" in c, and "Veronica nomine" for the Latin and Coptic. The Latin *Gesta Pilati* has her cry to the governor, "Item et mulier quaedam Veronica nomine a longe clamavit praesidi", and the Jews answer "Legem habemus mulierem ad testimonium non venire". That law is in no book of Moses. Its earliest statement is Josephus's: "γυναικῶν δὲ μὴ ἔστω μαρτυρία διὰ κουφότητα καὶ θράσος τοῦ γένους αὐτῶν" (*Antiquities* 4.219). The woman whose name crosses from Berenice to Veronica is refused as a witness by a law only Josephus records. This edge runs through a citable rule and needs no resemblance of names, so it carries more weight than the Huller row, and it should be developed first. The Slavonic *War*, for its part, ends on her name: its text breaks off at Catullus's victims, "жену его Вѣрникию", Alexander's wife Berenice (*War* 7.445), before the Greek's last sections, in which Josephus himself is accused and the history closes on its claim of truth.[48] That is a versional relationship available for study. An identification with a royal Berenice adds another edge with its own burden. A still further equation with Prunicus adds another. Each edge should remain visible.

A universal key can impoverish the writing when it turns every differentiated figure into a cover for one recovered individual. Yet dismissing a failed key in its entirety can discard a genuine observation about transformation. The unit of retention should be the particular relation and the passage that supports it.

The question of engineering becomes stronger when the proposed transformations survive this separation. Does the sequence still hold when an uncertain equation is removed? Does the next passage carry a relation the interpretation did not invent merely to reach it? Can a transformation be specified closely enough to risk failure?

## 8. The scholarly landscape: substantial equipment, a larger question

It would misdescribe the field to say that scholarship simply does not recognize these phenomena. The relevant work is extensive. The more useful question concerns how the recognized operations are related across the boundaries of their usual objects of study.

## Poetic naming and the biographical person

The introduction to *The Cambridge Companion to Catullus*, edited by Ian Du Quesnay and Tony Woodman, begins by questioning biographical dates and later acknowledges the problems of identifying addressees through pseudonyms, invective, and an untrustworthy speaker.[23] This is an important interlocutor: uncertainty about Catullus's life is already inside ordinary scholarly practice.

Lars Morten Gram's “Odi et amo: On Lesbia's Name in Catullus” explicitly makes the name's tensions and its Sapphic relation part of the poetic programme.[24] The accessible abstract supplies a precise bibliographic connection for the present argument; a full engagement with the chapter remains work for the next version. Our proposed extension asks how such naming operations participate in relations beyond one poet's programme.

## Allegory as cultural action

David Dawson's *Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria* treats allegorical reading as a means of revising culture, with Philo, Valentinus, and Clement among its central cases.[25] This provides a direct alternative to treating allegory as a detachable explanation appended to an otherwise intact narrative. The present essay's account of naming as consequential action belongs in conversation with that project. Its further question is whether composition and reception distribute the same operation across names that scholarship usually places in separate historical files.

## Figura and historical reality

Erich Auerbach's “Figura” distinguishes figural relations from an allegory of abstractions: a person or event can signify another while both retain historical reality within the interpretation.[26] This complicates a simple choice between history and allegory. The presence of a literary relation does not entail the disappearance of historical reference.

It also leaves a problem for this investigation. The historical standing of the terms cannot be inferred merely from their relation. We must inspect how each term acquires that standing. Auerbach's distinction helps formulate the question; it cannot settle the independent historical existence of each named figure we encounter.

## Historiography as composition

A. J. Woodman's *Rhetoric in Classical Historiography* challenges a straightforward continuity between ancient and modern historical practice.[27] Steve Mason's account of Josephus's *Life* places purposes, structures, themes, and literary interests before a simple extraction of biography.[28] Their projects make it possible to enter the present inquiry without first pretending that every historical narrative is transparent.

The additional task is to follow a specific operation across the border between an acknowledged literary construction and the metadata extracted from it. Where does an attributed voice become a historical witness? Where does a genealogy become an independent warrant? Where does the sorting of a work under a named person conceal the operation that made the person available?

## Texts make the identities used to classify them

Judith Lieu's *Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World* explicitly studies the construction of identity through texts and its continuities with surrounding cultures.[29] This is particularly pertinent to a field assembled across Roman, Jewish, and Christian materials. Those categories have histories within the texts as well as later uses in cataloguing them.

The present proposal therefore makes a claim about the scale and coordination of operations. That literature constructs identity is already known. The question is whether the crossings form a sufficiently recurrent and constrained system to alter how this particular field should be constituted and read.

There are practical reasons for resistance to specific alias reconstructions: undocumented equations, unconstrained sound resemblance, chronological conflicts, and arguments that assume the identities they purport to establish. These are substantive problems where they occur. They do not answer the different question of how the writing organizes reference. Conversely, the existence of literary sophistication cannot rescue a particular historical equation from a failed test.

This draft has not established a general causal history of scholarly exclusion. That would require a separate study of reviews, editions, correspondence, and decisions about what counts as an admissible question. Here the scholarly landscape supplies interlocutors and contrasts, with the limits of the reading recorded below.

## 9. From a resemblance collection to an inspectable system

“Every name is crossed and coded” is a powerful research intuition. As a proposition about a corpus, it needs a denominator: which names, in which witnesses, and how many of them show which operations? A claim about systematic construction should be allowed to become more demanding as the evidence grows.

The working unit is a **crossing**: a documented relation in which a designation retains or transfers a consequential feature across persons, speaking positions, functions, or textual settings. A crossing need not involve literal renaming. Conversely, a changed spelling does not necessarily constitute the kind of crossing at issue.

For each proposed instance, the record should preserve the following:

| Field | What it makes inspectable |
| --- | --- |
| Witness and locus | Edition, language, recension, section, and the words actually present |
| Naming act | Who names, who is named, and whether the act is disclosed |
| Retained relation | The particular wording, sequence, role, object, or relationship that persists |
| Transformation | What changes, and the rule proposed to explain the change |
| Access | Which narrator, character, or reader is said to know the name or relation |
| Consequence | What the naming authorizes, disqualifies, preserves, or makes possible |
| Direction | What establishes source, reception, revision, or an undecided relation |
| Alternative and break | A competing explanation and a finding that would defeat the proposed crossing |

Several discriminations are essential. A distinctive ordered sequence carries a different burden from a common motif. An explicit statement that two names designate one figure differs from a modern reconstruction. A transformation made by a translator belongs first to that translation. A recurring office differs from a recurring individual. Several texts repeating an earlier allegation do not automatically supply several independent witnesses to the alleged conduct.

Production history must also be discriminated. A compositional convention, a writer's transformation of an earlier work, an editorial intervention, and coordinated construction are distinguishable explanations. A demonstration of coordination must identify something that the less coordinated explanations leave unexplained. The alternatives should face the same passages and the same demand to explain their organization.

Evidence for engineering should combine constrained transformations, concentration at consequential points, and a pattern that survives comparison material. A writer's explicit explanation can establish local design. Wider coordination needs more: passages selected before their fit is known, failed predictions preserved, and comparisons drawn from texts that do not already belong to the proposed chain. Historical agency becomes a question the analysis can discriminate, with evidence for each answer.

## 9a. The archive's author-boundary protocols

The archive has already built the instruments this question needs, in the Plato–Aristotle and Aristotle–Theophrastus investigations. The question they put to any boundary is what work it does, and what warrants treating it as a boundary between composing persons. *Aristotle and Theophrastus ≠ Two Distinct Authors* separates hand from author, person from author-name, name from source and stylistic cluster from individual (#1588).[39] *Many and One* asks what a distinction between two names licenses when used to explain a passage (#1576).[40] *Aristotelian or Theophrastan* reads a name-boundary as a seam where a construction is reopened (#1583).[41] *The First Draft* sets five conditions before a name earns a function-position, and admits neither Chaerephon nor, by adjacency alone, Xenophon or Aristophanes (#1605).[42] *Measuring the Operation, Not the Name* tests partitions against operation, subject and authorship controls, with Chatterton's Rowley as the control that defeats the step from strong separation to distinct makers (#1593).[43] *Locating the Dependencies* asks for correspondence, direction and the exclusion of an independent source before a dependency is counted (#1602).[44] *Socrates as Orthonym* evaluates the one-maker and many-maker accounts on the same evidence (#1754).[45]

Two witnesses of this essay's field bear on those investigations directly. Apuleius, in the chapter that decodes Lesbia, defends erotic verse by quoting epigrams he gives to "Platonis philosophi" (*Apology* 10). Gellius, in the same book as his Sapphic banquet and two chapters after it, sets down an erotic epigram that "veteres scriptores … Platonis esse philosophi adfirmant" (19.11.2). The Latin authors who handle Catullus's names also file love poems under Plato's. The name-boundary between Plato the philosopher and Plato the poet is drawn and crossed inside the very sources that supply this essay's Lesbia.

## 9b. When an author boundary is useful

The following decision table is this essay's proposed application of those protocols. It asks what a boundary enables us to explain or do. Several uses may coexist, and each can survive the revision of another.

| Use of a boundary | What would make it useful | What remains a separate question |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Locating and citing a work | The name reliably resolves a particular textual object or reception history | Whether everything filed there came from one maker |
| Assigning accountability | A declared author or editor answers for the published construction | Which contributors, hands, or instruments participated |
| Describing a function | The division tracks a recurrent transformation under appropriate controls | Whether the function belongs exclusively to one embodied person |
| Establishing a production history | Independent evidence supports a claim about composing agents, revision, or chronology | Whether that history exhausts the work's meaningful divisions |
| Reconstructing transmission | The division tracks an edition, witness, catalogue, or change of attribution | Whether the division originated with the composition |
| Interpreting a relation | Keeping the positions distinct reveals what their disagreement, continuation, or correction accomplishes | Whether their difference requires different biological makers |

The rule proposed here is to **retain a boundary at the level where it explains something, and test every promotion of that boundary to another level**. Theophrastus can remain a consequential designation when a two-maker explanation of the seam is challenged. Lesbia remains indispensable to Catullus 51 even if a biographical identification with Clodia is accepted. A composing unity can require developed divisions in order to operate.

Applied to the present dossier, this changes what can be claimed now:

- **Lesbia and the performed Claudian ancestor** are named positions inside extant compositions. Their transformations are objects of analysis; neither thereby becomes a new author-position with a bounded corpus.
- **Ptolemaic and Herodian Berenice** occupy separately identified textual dossiers. A shared name and comparable royal or bodily functions invite a controlled comparison; a historical equation would require additional discriminating evidence.
- **Catullus and the Josephan witnesses** supply bounded textual objects, and their original-language alignment is now made (§6). What remains open is direction: which text, translator or reviser produced the correspondence (#1602). The comparison has not passed the archive's admission test for a shared authorial configuration.
- **Philo and Revelation** supply explicit local operations of naming and recognition. Testing a further compositional relation requires identifying the retained material and the transformation at each proposed seam, then establishing recurrence and examining controls. Revelation's withheld-name formula (19:12, 2:17, 3:12) is a local design that models what such a seam would need: the same formula retained in two places, a stated transformation (the name only the bearer knows becomes the name only the receiver knows), and a text that states the transfer itself. A cross-corpus seam meets the standard when it can show those three things across two corpora.

These verdicts concern different edges. A failed historical identification can leave a textual transformation available. A literary relation can succeed while direction remains open. A name can be structurally required without its inherited biography determining how the structure was made.

The reception inquiry has a corresponding task. *Legitimately Many* (#1733) studies the media through which names become durable divisions of a corpus, distinguishing its production hypothesis, its documented filing operations, and its explanation of their persistence. Its Hegel case follows a recovery of authorial unity inside dramatic plurality alongside a retained succession across author-names.[47] This gives the present essay a specific archive precedent for asking where an interpretive practice recognizes a crossing and where its cataloguing framework makes it stop.

## 10. A maker can become many without the many becoming disposable

The archive's governing production hypothesis is that one self-dividing maker composed the works received under Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus, distributing consequential positions across those names and Socrates. *What Syllogizing Can Divide* (#1658) states the production model and reads the relation between a maker's internal differentiation and a later reader's gathering of the positions.[46] That is the line carried here. The earlier protocols remain active as instruments for testing its grounds; their earlier abstention from maker-count does not replace the later proposal.

The broader field assembled in this essay acquires its own question under those instruments. Which crossings require a compositional relation, which mark transformations through reception, and where does a named position become indispensable to an explanation? Extending the field requires demonstrating the new seams. The unity already argued in the Socratic–Peripatetic investigation supplies a production hypothesis with a history and grounds. It extends to a further name only by a demonstrated seam.

The positions must have consequences within the writing. A teacher, receiver, accuser, beloved, prophet, and recorder can become sufficiently distinct to encounter one another. Their differences allow the composition to think through relations that a single unbroken voice could merely announce. A proposed unity that makes those differences cosmetic would explain less of the work.

This is the sense in which the many must be legitimate. The literary operation requires developed positions, with different capacities, commitments, and exposures. Recognition of their relation should deepen those differences.

The field assembled here supplies several means of producing that legitimacy: a beloved's allusive name; an ancestor's public authority; a transformation of character; a prophetic or genealogical succession; a city bearing several judgments; a disclosed name beside a withheld one. Their systematic relation is the thesis this essay puts forward for investigation.

The question with which to return to the texts is therefore exact: **how does the writing make a name carry a person, a prior text, a transformation, and a claim to authority at once—and what does it arrange through the reader's inability to discard any of them?**

## Working evidence map

| Locus | Operation directly available for reading | Wider join proposed here |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Apuleius, *Apology* 10 | Defense through a list of poetic name substitutions | Ancient reception already circulates identity maps |
| Catullus 51; 16; 79 | Sapphic rewriting, named address, disputed inference from verse to poet, onomastic insinuation | Poetic names mediate the relation between textual and embodied persons |
| Catullus 63; 66; 76; 109 | Changed body and grammar, a speaking bodily fragment, sacred fidelity and covenant | Personhood, material transformation, and erotic theology form a connected comparative dossier |
| Gellius 19.9, 19.11 | Performance, a Socratic gesture, attribution, and translation | A received text explicitly organizes a network of embodied and textual relations |
| Cicero, *Pro Caelio* 33–36 | Announced allocation of speech to ancestor and brother | A composed voice exercises inherited authority |
| Cicero, *De Domo Sua* 110–112 | Contest over a statue's sacred designation and alleged prior identity | Naming helps govern property, sanctity, and political memory |
| Philo, *Change of Names* 65–71, 121–128 | Names mark powers, character transformation, and activity | Naming articulates an ontology of achieved states and functions |
| Philo, *Cherubim* 40–52; *Confusion* 146–149 | Allegorical generation, textual discipleship, plural names, spiritual descent | Persons and pedigrees can be constituted through reading and practice |
| Revelation 11:8; 17:9–10; 19:12–13; 2:17 | Explicitly layered reference and differential access to names | Disclosure preserves plurality and regulates recognition |
| Josephus, *Against Apion* 1.28–43, 73–92 | Authorization through archives and genealogy; contested ethnic designation | Metadata is a participant in the argument it helps transmit |
| Catullus 51 ↔ Josephan witnesses | A proposed comparison of qualified human/divine predicates | Alignment made (§6); transmission direction open (#1602) |
| *Gospel of Nicodemus* VII | Versional name forms in James's presentation | A firm local edge can be distinguished from wider identity equations |
| Archive #1576; #1583; #1588 | Differentiated senses of unity, a functional seam, and four separations in attribution | A boundary's textual role can be tested separately from its use to count makers |
| Archive #1605; #1593; #1602; #1754 | Admission conditions, attribution controls, dependency columns, and symmetric evaluation | The proposed field can be extended through stated tests while preserving dated claim development |


## Original-language ledger (v0.3)

Each primary locus with the witness the quotation is taken from. "Seated" means held in the archive's originals library with a manifest; the others were read in open editions in session on 12 November 2026.

| Locus | Witness |
| --- | --- |
| Apuleius, *Apologia* 10 | R. Helm via Perseus, canonical-latinLit phi1212.phi001 (perseus-lat1) |
| Sappho fr. 31.1 | EA-CORPORA-01/10, seated |
| Catullus 16, 51, 63, 66, 76, 79, 109 | Merrill (1893) via Perseus, EA-CORPORA-01/02, seated |
| Gellius, *Noctes Atticae* 19.9, 19.10, 19.11 | C. Hosius (1903) via Perseus, EA-CORPORA-36/36, seated; the seated text carries its apparatus inline, removed in quotation |
| Cicero, *Pro Caelio* 33–36 | A. C. Clark via Perseus, canonical-latinLit phi0474.phi024 (perseus-lat2) |
| Cicero, *De domo sua* 110–112 | W. Peterson via Perseus, phi0474.phi020 (perseus-lat2) |
| Cicero, *Pro Flacco* 66–69 | A. C. Clark via Perseus, phi0474.phi017 (perseus-lat2) |
| Cicero, *Ad Atticum* 2.9 | L. C. Purser (1903) via Perseus, EA-CORPORA-32/06, seated |
| Josephus, *Antiquities* 4.219, 18.63, 18.259, 19.276, 20.145–146; *War* 3.391, 7.417; *Against Apion* 1.29–41, 1.82, 1.91 | Niese, EA-CORPORA-01/01, seated |
| Slavonic *War*, after 2.174 | Meshcherskii 1958, EA-CORPORA-37/01, seated; ѣ restored where the OCR misreads it |
| Nicolaus, autobiography | C. Müller, FHG III, fr. 4, p. 350, EA-CORPORA-32/12, seated |
| Philo, *De mutatione nominum* 65, 70, 121, 123, 125, 181; *De Cherubim* 49; *De confusione linguarum* 146; *De vita Mosis* 2.135 | Cohn–Wendland via First1KGreek, EA-CORPORA-01/07, seated |
| Revelation 1:14, 1:16, 2:12, 2:17, 2:18, 2:27, 3:12, 3:14, 11:8, 17:9–10, 19:11–15 | Nestle 1904, seated (gnt-nestle1904) |
| Philo, *De vita contemplativa* 78; Eusebius, *Historia ecclesiastica* 2.17.20 | Cohn–Wendland, EA-CORPORA-01/07, seated; Eusebius seated (eusebius-historia-ecclesiastica) |
| *Acta Pilati* / *Gesta Pilati* VII | Tischendorf, *Evangelia apocrypha* (2nd ed., 1876), Internet Archive evangeliaapocryp00tisc: the Latin text as printed; the Greek name forms from the apparatus, whose Greek the OCR does not read, so the forms are given as Tischendorf's sigla report them |

## Sources and reading basis

Primary texts below were consulted in accessible public editions or translations, alongside the saved Catullus–Clodia research checkpoint. Section references identify the relevant passages; links identify the particular access copy. The draft supplies interpretations rather than new manuscript collations. The scholarly landscape uses the Cambridge introduction and the accessible author/publisher descriptions or abstracts specified below; it does not represent a complete reading of the books behind access barriers. The Auerbach discussion rests on the retrievable passage from “Figura,” not a fresh reading of the whole essay. Further reading should replace these preliminary bibliographic contacts with full, page-specific engagement.

1. [Apuleius, *Apology* 10, Latin and translation, Living Poets](https://livingpoets.dur.ac.uk/w/index.php/Apuleius,_Apology_10).
2. [Catullus 51, Dickinson College Commentaries](https://dcc.dickinson.edu/catullus/51). The Sapphic comparison is with Fragment 31; its interpretation within the archive is a connected argument, not established anew by this draft.
3. [Catullus 16, Dickinson College Commentaries](https://dcc.dickinson.edu/catullus/16).
4. [Catullus 79, Dickinson College Commentaries](https://dcc.dickinson.edu/catullus/79).
5. [Cicero, *Pro Caelio*, especially 33–36, translated R. Y. Hathorn](https://www.attalus.org/cicero/caelius.html).
6. [Cicero, *De Domo Sua* 105–147, especially 110–112, translated N. H. Watts](https://www.attalus.org/cicero/domo3.html).
7. [Josephus, *Antiquities* 20, chapter 7.3; modern numbering 20.145–146](https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Josephus/ant-20.html), Whiston translation. Narratorial reports of sexual conduct retain their reported or alleged standing.
8. [Philo, *On the Change of Names*](https://ccel.org/ccel/philo/works/works.iii.xx.html), C. D. Yonge translation, especially 65–71, 121–128. [Separate access to 121–124](https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?chunk.id=00000045&docId=%2FAntiquities-EN%2FAntiquities.Philo.136.html).
9. [Philo, *On the Cherubim*](https://ccel.org/ccel/philo/works/works.iii.v.html), especially 40–52, Yonge translation.
10. [Philo, *On the Confusion of Tongues*](https://earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book15.html), especially 146–149, Yonge translation.
11. [Johannes Sigil and Damascus Dancings, *In the Midst of the Seven*, EA-MIDST-01 v1.1, Alexanarch #1758](https://www.alexanarch.org/s/records/1758/), especially its distinction between a quoted identity claim and an analytical construction. Connected framework: [Johannes Sigil, *The Historical Logos: The Framework Hologram*, v1.3, #1757](https://www.alexanarch.org/s/records/1757/). These are archive arguments with named heteronymic bylines and deposit accountability to Lee Sharks.
12. [Revelation 11:8, Greek text and analysis](https://biblehub.com/text/revelation/11-8.htm).
13. [Revelation 17:9, Greek text and analysis](https://biblehub.com/text/revelation/17-9.htm); read with 17:10. Verse divisions vary in where the clause about the kings begins.
14. [Revelation 19:12](https://biblehub.com/text/revelation/19-12.htm) and [19:13](https://biblehub.com/text/revelation/19-13.htm), Greek texts.
15. [Revelation 2:17, Greek text and analysis](https://biblehub.com/text/revelation/2-17.htm).
16. [Josephus, *Against Apion* 1](https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Josephus/apion-1.html), Whiston translation. Historical reconstructions from its archive claims require their own evaluation.
17. *Catullus, Clodia, and Jewish literary-political culture*, research checkpoint, 12 November 2026. The record preserves the then-unresolved Greek/Slavonic alignment and the need to identify the witness behind *ei exestin*. Both are now settled in §6 from the seated Slavonic (EA-CORPORA-37/01) and *The Word That Became Text* v2.0 (#1761), which withdraws the phrase.
18. [Stephan Huller, “The many (Christian) faces of Berenice,” 2008](https://therealmessiahbook.blogspot.com/2008/04/many-christian-faces-of-berenice.html). Its identifications remain the author's proposals.
19. [Francesco Carotta, *Jesus was Caesar*, “Words and Wonders,” 2005 extracts](https://www.carotta.de/subseite/texte/jwc_e/w&w.html), especially the Clodia/*quadrans* comparison. The proposed name transformations are not adopted as established derivations.
20. [Robert H. Eisenman, “Paul as Herodian”](https://robertheisenman.com/paul-as-herodian/); [older author-hosted copy](https://roberteisenman.com/articles/paul_as_herodian.htm). *Journal of Higher Criticism* 3 (Spring 1996), 110–122, per the author's page. Indexed author text was retrievable; direct page requests timed out. This draft uses only the explicitly recoverable argument, not an asserted full reading of the paper.
21. [Roman Piso, “Ancient Alias Names List (2017)”](https://pisoproject.wordpress.com/ancient-alias-names-list-2017-2/); Jerry Russell's 2016 discussion of the Reuchlin/Piso system, “Mateo Piso Christ, Sun of Jane the Virgin,” preserved in the [Postflaviana archive](https://postflaviana.org/home/). The discussion is one article within a heterogeneous site, not a warrant for its other claims.
22. [*Gospel of Nicodemus*, VII, in M. R. James, *The Apocryphal New Testament* (1924)](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Apocryphal_New_Testament_(1924)/Passion_Gospels/The_Gospel_of_Nicodemus). James's presentation is an edition/translation with versional notes; a further argument should return to the particular language witnesses.
23. Ian Du Quesnay and Tony Woodman, introduction to [*The Cambridge Companion to Catullus*, accessible excerpt](https://assets.cambridge.org/97811071/93567/excerpt/9781107193567_excerpt.pdf). The excerpt rather than the whole volume was read for this draft.
24. Lars Morten Gram, [“Odi et amo: On Lesbia's Name in Catullus”](https://academic.oup.com/book/3582/chapter-abstract/144866280), in Thea S. Thorsen and Stephen Harrison, eds., *Roman Receptions of Sappho* (2019), 95–118. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198829430.003.0006. Abstract consulted; full chapter not yet read.
25. David Dawson, [*Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria*](https://www.ucpress.edu/books/allegorical-readers-and-cultural-revision-in-ancient-alexandria/epub-pdf). UC Press lists December 1991; the author's institutional bibliography and conventional citations give 1992. Publisher's account and institutional metadata consulted, not the full book.
26. Erich Auerbach, “Figura” (1938), English translation in *Scenes from the Drama of European Literature*, especially p. 53. [University-hosted extract](https://complit.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/COL1000H_Erich_Aurbach_Figura.pdf): indexed text was retrievable; direct access presented a verification page. The distinction described above is limited to that recovered passage.
27. A. J. Woodman, [*Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies* (1988)](https://www.routledge.com/Rhetoric-in-Classical-Historiography-Four-Studies/Woodman/p/book/9780203480533). Publisher description and contents consulted.
28. Steve Mason, [“Josephus's Autobiography (Life of Josephus)”](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118325162.ch3), in Honora Howell Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers, eds., *A Companion to Josephus* (2015). DOI: 10.1002/9781118325162.ch3. Author's published summary consulted; full chapter not yet read.
29. Judith Lieu, [*Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World* (2004)](https://academic.oup.com/book/10917). DOI: 10.1093/0199262896.001.0001. Book and introduction abstracts consulted; full book not yet read.
30. [Catullus 63, Dickinson College Commentaries](https://dcc.dickinson.edu/catullus/63).
31. [Catullus 66, Dickinson College Commentaries](https://dcc.dickinson.edu/catullus/66). The speaking lock and its queen belong first to this text's royal and celestial construction; the shared name Berenice does not establish identity with the Herodian queen.
32. [Catullus 76](https://dcc.dickinson.edu/catullus/76) and [109](https://dcc.dickinson.edu/catullus/109), Dickinson College Commentaries.
33. [Gellius, *Attic Nights* 19, Latin text](https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/l/roman/texts/Gellius/19*.html), especially 19.9 and 19.11. Claims about Plato's authorship remain Gellius's reported attribution.
34. [Cicero, *Atticus* 2.9](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letters_to_Atticus/2.9). Reading the Juno designation as Clodia follows the contextual identification in the edition; distinguish the designation from its decoding.
35. [Cicero, *Pro Flacco* 52–106](https://www.attalus.org/cicero/flaccus2.html), especially 66–69, translated L. E. Lord. The hostile characterization of Jewish worship is Cicero's advocacy, not this essay's description.
36. [Josephus, *Antiquities* 18.259](https://lexundria.com/j_aj/18.259/wst) and [19.276](https://lexundria.com/j_aj/19.276/wst), Whiston translation.
37. [Nicolaus, autobiography fragments 134–136](https://www.attalus.org/translate/nicolaus2.html), translated C. M. Hall, with editorial framing on the access page. The fragments' narrative and their transmission remain part of the evidence to assess.
38. Lena Einhorn, [“Jesus and the ‘Egyptian Prophet’”](https://lenaeinhorn.se/jesus-and-the-egyptian-prophet/), presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, 2012. The publicly available article supplies the proposed time-shift comparison; it is distinct from other versions of the author's reconstruction.
39. Lee Sharks, [*Aristotle and Theophrastus ≠ Two Distinct Authors*, EA-MPAI-ARISTOTLE-THEOPHRASTUS-01 v0.2, #1588](https://www.alexanarch.org/s/records/1588/), especially the four separations and the distinction between an author-name and a composing source. Its numerical claims must be read through the later corrections in #1593 and the current map #1754.
40. Lee Sharks, [*Many and One: Division, Unity, and the Boundaries of a Corpus in Plato and Aristotle*, v2.13-AP, #1576](https://www.alexanarch.org/s/records/1576/), especially §§7.4–9. This submitted version precedes the Theophrastus investigation and the later governing production model.
41. Lee Sharks, [*Aristotelian or Theophrastan: The Hinge in Theophrastus's Metaphysics and the Division of One Work by Name*, v0.2, #1583](https://www.alexanarch.org/s/records/1583/), especially its comparison of the three explanations of the seam. The present essay reports the argument; it does not supply a new collation of its Greek witnesses.
42. Lee Sharks, [*The First Draft*, v1.0 FINAL, #1605](https://www.alexanarch.org/s/records/1605/), §§13–15: named function, the five-condition stopping rule, Chaerephon, and function × mode. Relevant sections consulted directly. Its early maker-count statements retain their dates under the later framework.
43. Lee Sharks, [*Measuring the Operation, Not the Name*, v0.4 with reference implementation, #1593](https://www.alexanarch.org/s/records/1593/), especially the corrected controls and withdrawals in §§5b–5c. Measurements are the archive's reported results; this revision performs no new computational replication.
44. Lee Sharks, [*Locating the Dependencies: A Protocol for Testing Whether Biography, Catalogue and Chronology Are Independent Witnesses*, #1602](https://www.alexanarch.org/s/records/1602/), especially §2 and the two case verdicts. The protocol's stricter claim of an established dependency remains distinct from an observed correspondence.
45. Lee Sharks, [*Socrates as Orthonym—The Framework Hologram*, EA-HK-ORTHONYM-01 v1.3, #1754](https://www.alexanarch.org/s/records/1754/), especially the governing claim, development of maker-count states, symmetric ledger, and consequences of the open research lines. The current version governs the reading of earlier claim states.
46. Lee Sharks, [*What Syllogizing Can Divide: De anima III.5, the Divided Mind, and the Socket in God*, EA-DIVISION-OF-GOD-01 v0.2, #1658](https://www.alexanarch.org/s/records/1658/), especially the production model and §§30–35 on production and reception. Its textual argument and external-attestation ledger have separate functions.
47. Lee Sharks, [*Legitimately Many: How the Many-Author Reading of the Socratic–Peripatetic Corpus Embrittled*, EA-LEGITIMATELY-MANY-01 v1.1, #1733](https://www.alexanarch.org/s/records/1733/), especially the three-layer design and the Hegel case, §§6.4–6.6. The reception argument is not substituted for proof of a production model.

48. The Slavonic *War*, Meshcherskii 1958 (EA-CORPORA-37/01, #1760): the rubric before the wonder-worker, the Temple inscription (seated text, line 14922), and the end of the text at *War* 7.445. R. Eisler, ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣ ΟΥ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣΑΣ (1929–1930; EA-CORPORA-37/04). The archive's reading is *The Word That Became Text* v2.0 (#1761); version 1.0 is #626.
49. Philo, *De vita contemplativa* 78, Cohn–Wendland (EA-CORPORA-01/07, seated); Eusebius, *Historia ecclesiastica* 2.17.20 (seated), which reads λέξεις for Philo's διατάξεις.

## Remaining priorities

1. Done in v0.3: original-language passages beside the translations; every supplied rendering identified in the ledger.
2. Done in v0.3: the Catullus–Josephus witness alignment (§6). It is evidence of a recurring arrangement; it is not yet evidence of a textual genealogy, which needs direction (#1602).
3. Done in v0.7: the *Acta Pilati* B XI Greek checked against Tischendorf's printed page (§6).
4. Check Cohn's apparatus at *De vita contemplativa* 78 for λέξεις (§4).
5. Develop the *Acta Pilati* / *Antiquities* 4.219 row of §7 first, since it runs through a citable rule.
6. Read Gram, Dawson, Lieu, Mason, and Auerbach in full at the relevant loci, giving their strongest arguments rather than relying on bibliographic summaries.
7. Expand the material contact dossier of §3a through the full correspondence, family records, and the textual transmission of Nicolaus's fragments. Social contact and textual dependency require separate demonstrations.
8. Develop §2a's account of changed bodies, changed speakers, translation, and attribution through original-language alignments. Keep Ptolemaic Berenice II distinct from Herodian Berenice throughout.
9. Turn the evidence map into a passage ledger with comparison material and preserved failures. Add the boundary's claimed function, the five admission conditions, and separate dependency columns A–C. Investigate scholarly reception separately from the truth of any proposed identification.
10. Apply the author-boundary decision table at each proposed cross-corpus join. Preserve the current production hypothesis and the dates of the protocols that developed toward it; route each new result only to the claims it actually bears on.

*Drafting provenance: prepared by ChatGPT under Lee Sharks's direction from the conversation, the saved research checkpoint, public primary texts, and the bibliographic materials identified above. Draft 0.2 reads the author-boundary protocols at the specified sections, adds §§9a–9b, and revises §10 to connect the current production hypothesis to the dated investigation. Versions 0.3–0.5 were prepared by Claude under Lee Sharks's direction, with reviews by DeepSeek and ChatGPT checked against the texts: v0.3 set the original language beside every locus and closed the §6 alignment; v0.4 took πολυώνυμος as the essay's term, set Revelation's withheld-name formula at the centre of §5, added the *Acta Pilati* row to §7, and moved Apuleius and Gellius into §9a; v0.5 brings the cross-references into line, adds the *Acta Pilati* B witness to §6 and reads the Revelation formula as the model for a cross-corpus seam; v0.6 separates the three operations of §1, argues the Revelation identification, divides Gellius's banquet from his Plato notice, and adds Philo's mirror of names; v0.7 checks the *Acta Pilati* page and parses *si fas est*; v0.8 traces *ei exestin* to Whiston. The decision table in §9b and its application to the wider field are proposed in this essay. The author adopted the essay for deposit as version 1.0 on 12 November 2026.*