No wonder the name is common. Seven saints bore it besides the proto-martyr, and among them, that admirable King of Hungary, who endeared it to his people, and left the crown so highly honoured at Prague. Our name of Stephen is probably due to the acquaintance of the Normans with Ancona, whence William the Conqueror obtained such interest in St. Stephen as to dedicate to him the Abbey built at Caen. There is no instance of the name in Domesday Book, and our king of turbulent memory derived it from his father, the Count de Blois. In the roll of Winchester householders in Stephen’s reign we find, however, already Stephen de Crickeled and “Stephen the Saracen.” Could this last have been a convert brought home from the East, and baptized in honour of the pious Count de Blois, father of the king—perhaps an adherent of the family? It is everywhere in use, varied according to the manner in which the tongue treated the double consonant. The feminine began at Cambrai at least as early as the thirteenth century, and it is frequent in Caen, probably in honour of St. Stephen’s Abbey at Caen.
| English. | German. | French. | Italian. |
| Stephen | Stephan | Etienne | Stefano |
| Steffel | Tiennon | Steffano | |
| Tiennot | |||
| Estevennes | |||
| Spanish. | Portuguese. | Dutch. | Russian. |
| Estevan | Estevao | Steven | Stefan |
| Esteban | Stepan | ||
| Stenka | |||
| Stepka | |||
| Polish. | Illyrian. | Esthonian. | Hungarian. |
| Sscezepan | Stepan | Tewa | Istvan |
| Lusatian. | Stepo | ||
| Scezpan | Stepko | ||
| Stepika | |||
| FEMININE. | |||
| English. | French. | Portuguese. | Russian. |
| Stephan | Estephanie | Estephania | Stefanida |
| Stefanie | German. | ||
| Etiennette | Stephanine | ||
| Tiennette | |||
I venture here to include the numerous names of which the leading word is Ὀλυμπ. They are generally derived from Mount Olympos, the habitation of the gods; but I cannot help thinking them more likely to be connected with the Olympian games, and to have been first invented for children born in the year of an Olympiad.
There were numerous varieties, but none have survived except the feminine Olympias, belonging to the proud but much beloved mother of Alexander, and, like all other Macedonian names, spreading through the East. A Byzantine widow, of great piety and charity, who stood faithful to St. Chrysostom during his persecution by the empress, was canonized, and sent Olympias on to be a favourite with the Greeks, so that it flourishes among all ranks in the Ionian Islands. Italy had her Olimpia, probably through the Greek connections of Venice; and the noble and learned Olimpia Morata rendered it famous. It was brought to France by the niece of Mazarin, the Comtesse de Soissons, of evil fame as a poisoner, and yet the mother of Prince Eugène. From her, apparently, Olympe spread among French ladies and long continued fashionable, and Surtee’s History of the County Palatine of Durham mentions an Olympia Wray, married in 1660.
Here, too, must be mentioned Milone, though its connection with the subject is only through Milon, the famous Greek wrestler of Crotona, who carried a heifer through the Stadium at Olympia, and afterwards ate her up in a single meal; killed a bull with one stroke of his fist; and finally, was caught by the hands in the recoil of a riven oak, and there imprisoned till eaten by the wolves. Michaelis thinks the root of the word is the same with that of the old German verb milan, to beat or crush, the relation of our mills. Thence may likewise have come the Latin Miles, and the Keltic Milidh, both meaning a warrior.
Milo belonged to the realms of romance. In the story of the Golden Ass of Apuleius, Milon is the master of the house where the unfortunate hero undergoes his transformation; and having thus entered the world of imagination, Milon, or Milone as Italian poets call him, became a paladin of Charlemagne; Milan was a Welsh knight in one of Marie of Bretagne’s lays; and in a curious old French romance, Miles is the father of two children, one of whom is brought up by a lion, and defended by an ape as his champion. These stories, or their germs, must have struck the Norman fancy, for a Milo appears among the newly installed landholders in Domesday Book, and Milo Fitzwilliam stands early in the Essex pedigrees, but very soon the vernacular form became Miles. Among the Norman settlers in Ireland, Miles was a frequent name; and in the Stanton family, when it had become so thoroughly Hibernicized as to dislike the Norman appellation, one branch assumed the surname of MacAveely, son of Milo, according to the change of pronunciation undergone by Erse consonants in the genitive. Miles or Myles itself was adopted as an English equivalent for the native Erse Maelmordha, or majestic chief, and has now become almost an exclusively Irish name, though sometimes used in England by inheritance from Norman ancestors, and generally incorrectly derived from the Latin Miles, whereas its immediate parent is certainly the Greek Milo.[[39]]
[38]. Butler; Surius; Sir Cuthbert Sharpe, Extracts from Parish Registers.
[39]. Liddell and Scott; Butler; Neale, Hymns of the Greek Church; Smith; Dunlop, History of Fiction; Hanmer, Chronicle of Ireland; Publications of Irish and Ossianic Societies.