L'ultimo re eraclide di Lidia: Kandaules, Myrsilos, Sadyattes

This article is devoted to the study of the etymology of the name of the last king of Lydian dynasty of the Hreaclids, Kandaules according to the Greek historian Herodotus. Herodotus preserves a complicated story about his being killed by Gyges, pressed by Kandaules' wife wishing to avenge a sexual offence by Kandaules who had forced Gyges to contemplate her naked. Gyges thus inaugurated with a true court plot the new royal dynasty of the Mermnads. Many scholars proposed various etymologies for the proper name Kandaules attributing it to various Indo-European languages of different linguistic groups, and assigned various meanings to that name, among which the most important and widely accepted is the connection with the term "dog". It is suggested that Kandaules is to be connected to Luwian hantawatis, "king", which is attested in the IInd millennium BCE cuneiform texts from the Hittite capital Hattuša and in Ist millennium BCE texts, in the wide Luwian linguistic milieu extending from Cilicia (south-eastern Anatolia) to Lycia, Caria and Lydia. A detailed study is dedicated to a widespread explanation of the name as connected to "dog" based on a short fragment of the Greek iambic poet Hipponattes (Vth cent. BCE). Hipponattes attributed to the Greek god Hermes an epithet meaning "dog-throttler" (referring to a weel-known myth) and stated that in the ancient Lydian language the latter corresponded to the proper name Kandaules. It is demonstrated, however, that Hipponattes voluntary produced a parodistic parallelism between the Luwian term for "king" and Hermes' epithet connected with dogs, aiming at making irony about the last heraclid king. It is also demonstrated that the connection between Hipponattes' parodistic etymology and the ritual burying of dog puppies (maybe after sacrifice) attested in the Sardis excavations suggested in the past by various scholars cannot be proven at all.