Chapter Text
Ancient Greeks identified themselves with a single name. If they needed to be more specific, they'd add their patronymic and when away from home, their city-state of origin. When they were at home, they would tell you which particular neighborhood they came from, or if it were more relevant, their tribal affiliation. Those who were especially important and/or famous might get an epithet (like "Eagle Bearer") but it wouldn't be something your friends would call you, usually. Barnabas, who regularly refers to Alexios as a demigod, probably calls him "Eagle Bearer" all the damned time.
Around the time of Homer (about 400 years before the events of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey), the patronymic of a name was formed by adding the suffix -ides to the father’s name for the nominative case. By the time of Classical Greece, this had given way to simply using the genitive case (possessive form) of the father’s name as a patronymic. Hence Alexios is Alexios Nikolaou in this story and not Alexios Nikolaides.
Declining Greek nouns is a son of a bitch, let me tell you. "Lykaiskon"/”Alexiskos” are, if I am remembering correctly (and I may not be) the diminutive versions of theirs name, which is to say the pet name/affectionate version. Classical Greek was not a neat and tidy language, unlike Classical Latin. Give me five declensions and the ablative but all of it nice and regular and not requiring finding a stem and figuring out how to turn someone's name neuter - because that ALSO was part of making it diminutive. Study Latin, that's my advice. The whole thing is made more complicated by the fact that “Alexios” as a name is an anachronism. It’s not Classical Greek, it’s Byzantine Greek, and that area of the world wouldn’t start speaking Greek until after Alexander the Great conquered it, which comes roughly 70 years after the end of the Second Peloponnesian war in 405BCE, and a century after the game (and the Second Peloponnesian War) starts in 431BCE.
All of this is entirely aside from transliterating names (switching them from the Greek alphabet to the Latin alphabet we use for English). I have tended to be more consistent with academic convention than the game's convention (using Boiotia instead of Boeotia) because the game will err on the side of familiarity, which means in some cases erring on the side of later spellings that will be more familiar to modern eyes. Much like they called Bayek's village Siwa in the last game, and not Sekht-Imauw, which is the name Bayek would have known it by. Hence why you will find “Lakedaimon” and derivatives instead of “Lakonia” (or worse, "Laconia"), the latter being the modern name of an administrative area of Greece that didn’t come into use until long after the time period of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The convention we inherited from Rome by which the Greek letter kappa is transliterated as the Latin alphabet’s “c” is not to be borne as it introduces ambiguity in pronunciation. The Romans really do ruin everything. Hence Lakedaimon and not “Lacedaemon” - I similarly refuse to transliterate iota as “e” just because the orderly bastards in Rome wanted it that way.
At any rate, you can usually google the transliterations I have used if context doesn’t clarify them for you. I also find more direct transliteration to be a help with pronunciation, because none of us are ancient Romans anymore. Although if you did study Latin and came to Classical Greek authors via Roman translations of their works you are probably going to want to throw a book at my head at some point during this fic. Resist the urge, the versions of names you learned were corrupted by decadent Rome.