Taken aback to see Αἰόλος instead of Αἴολος in a number of texts, including Strabo as edited by Meineke, who is followed by Radt. It’s a discussion that apparently goes back to antiquity.
Herodian says, keep the accent on the proper name like the accent on the adjective, so Αἰόλος.
τὸ δὲ <αἰόλος> εἴτε κύριον εἴτε ἐπίθετον παροξύνεται.
This statement is one reason Radt gives for printing it with accent on the penult, which is also found in the best Strabo mss. Sadly, just a few lines earlier Herodian also gives Αἴολος as an example of the rule that words in -ολος are accented on the antepenult, whether proper or common, and that accent is back when he discusses it in the context of how to spell ‘e’ before vowels (as ε, but with a list of exceptions including Αἴολος).
Τὰ εἰς <ολος> ὑπὲρ δύο συλλαβὰς ἁπλᾶ κύρια ἢ προσηγορικὰ προπαροξύνεται, <Αἴολος> τὸ ἐθνικὸν ὁμοφώνως τῷ οἰκιστῇ..
Huh, I hope we’re not supposed to read all instances of the Wind god as Αἰόλος but Αἴολος for the son of Hellen? Insert emoji.
Eustathius’s Iliad commentary mentions it as an issue in the scholarly tradition:
Ἰστέον δὲ ὅτι τὸν Αἰόλον, τὸ κύριον, ἐξ οὗ Αἰολίδης Σίσυφος, βούλεται ἡ
τέχνη τῶν διαφόρως τονουμένων λέξεων προπαροξύνεσθαι πρὸς διαφορὰν τοῦ
αἰόλος ὁ ποικίλος. Αἴολος γάρ, φησί, τὸ κύριον.
Hilariously (?), in a few recensions of John Philoponus’s De vocabulis quae diversum significatum exhibent secundum differentiam accentus [on words that have a different meaning depending on the accentuation] the distinction is made in the opposite direction..
“<Αἰόλος>· τὸ κύριον παροξύνεται, <αἴολος>· ὁ ποικίλος προπαροξύνεται.”
It’s indeed normal for proper nouns to be accented differently from common nouns, such as Φαῖδρος next to φαιδρός. In this case, apparently, editors decided for a while that there’s no evidence for such an accent shift, printing Αἰόλον, but LSJ, DGE, etc., consider Αἴολος the proper name and don’t even mention the rumbles in the tradition. I’m surprised that there’s no trace of the tradition represented by Meineke et al. in the dictionaries from a range of periods (OK: Harper’s prints Αἰόλος so there’s a bit of a trace..).
Meta: This is the first post with substantial Greek in it, not optimistic how it will look in a random WP font..
Gordian’s lemmatizer: The boring outcome is that I’ll use Αἴολος for the proper name but keep the όλος spelling around in the Strabo text. That way, there’s one lemma (pace those who want to have different Aioloses for different characters, a whole ‘nother story..), regardless of the accentuation convention you’d like to follow.
