The speaker of Demosthenes 56 had lent money to a ship-owner Dionysodorus for a commercial voyage, and now is prosecuting him for breach of contract. The prosecutor is usually thought to be a metic. In the course of the speech he does not identify himself; but Libanius in his Argumenta of Demosthenes supplies a name, Darius: Arg. 54.1 Δαρεῖος καὶ Πάμφιλος Διονυσοδώρῳ δανείζουσι and 2 ὡς δὲ Δαρεῖος λέγει. The manuscripts of the Argumenta, which begin in the tenth century, are numerous; Foerster (VIII 677) and Dindorf/Blass (III xlviii) cite no variant for the name. Libanius’ source for this information is unrecoverable.

One can wonder, however, at a man making his way in classical Athens, and even hoping to win over a jury, if burdened with that unfriendly name.Footnote ¹ In a later age, two men named Darius are on record in Athens: Εὔνικος Δαρείου of Eupyridai is in a catalogue of the first century b.c. (IG II² 2462.13),Footnote ² and Δαρεῖος Εὐνόμου of Semachidai was an ephebe in a.d. 163/4 (2086.82, 2087.53). The name perhaps gave little offence in the cosmopolitan world of Roman Athens, so much visited or adopted by foreigners with alien names.

In any case, we should be uncomfortable with a Darius holding forth to a jury in classical Athens. An alternative is suggested by an error in the transmission of 1 Maccabees. The king of Sparta who famously wrote a friendly letter to the Jews is there called Δαρεῖος. So the MSS: already the earliest, the Sinaiticus of the fourth century, has at 1 Macc. 12:7 δαριου του βασιλευοντος, but a garbled ονιααρηc βασιλευς at 12:20.Footnote ³ Josephus, abstracting this episode from 1 Maccabees, had it right: βασιλεὺς Ἄρειος (AJ 12.225, 12.226). This offers a probable terminus post quem for the LXX error Δαρεῖος: Josephus found the correct name in his copy of 1 Maccabees—more likely than a correction made by Josephus himself or by one of his copyists. In brief, an early scribe of 1 Maccabees was attracted from a name unfamiliar to him to one well known to every reader of the Bible, the βασιλεὺς Δαρεῖος of Ezra and Daniel.Footnote ⁴ The error was intellectual rather than palaeographic, and it endured; the correction Ἄρειος was first made by Fritzsche in 1871, citing Josephus.Footnote ⁵

I suggest that the same error can have occurred in the transmission of Libanius’ summaries of Demosthenes: a copyist has turned the name αρειος, to him unknown, into δαρειος. He must have worked before a fourth-century theologian made the name notorious to Christians—Arius. A dozen men in Athens are attested with the name Areios, scattered from the sixth century b.c. to the third a.d. In the one fourth-century instance, an Areios is listed in a record of naval expenditures of 323/2 b.c., a catapult operator who was a metic: καταπελτ]αφέτ[ηι] ὧι [ὄνο]μα̣ Ἀρείωι [ἐν Σκα]μβωνιδῶν [οἰκ]οῦντι (IG II² 1631.514). The Demosthenic speech dates from the 320s, for Cleomenes in Egypt (†323/2) is current or recent (Dem. 56.7). It would be rash to identify a firmly attested Areios with a late and emended datum of unknown authority. But having a good Greek name, rather than that of the loser at Marathon or lately in Anatolia, would have saved the prosecutor from some embarrassment.Footnote ⁶