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Our knowledge of the use of the local ethnic in early documents is limited not only by the scarcity of evidence, but also because by definition the ethnic form, was from the outset used almost exclusively as a means of external identification outside the individual polis or other unit to which the ethnic and its bearer belonged — whether in another city, or in a sanctuary, local or panhellenic, or any other external context. It is in sanctuaries, large and small, that are found most of the examples of texts from the Archaic period in which the ethnic is used. The basic function of the ethnic, regional or civic, was to indicate and identify ‘hereditary membership’, as a member either of a race or tribe, Greek or barbarian, or of a civic body. Where the ‘ethnic’ was recorded, attached to an individual or to a group, it represented the external criterion of identification, individual or collective, in the international world of regional groups and city-states.

The most significant change that occurred with the growth and expansion of Roman power in the Greek world was the piecemeal introduction of Roman names towards the end of the Hellenistic age, and, in due course, with the bestowal of Roman citizenship, the very different onomastic formulae of which led to varieties in terminology, as the Greek-speaking population was increasingly affected by the system of nomenclature employed by the Romans, and bestowed in due course on them. This chapter focuses on the changes that occurred in the traditional Greek system of ethnic forms and usage. The discussion covers multiple civic ethnics and the establishment of Christian communities in and after the fourth century.

The epitomised Stephanus is the only text of an Ethnika surviving from antiquity. Consequently we cannot speak of his successors in the same way that he himself may be regarded as successor of Oros, or at a further remove, of Alexander Polyhistor or Herennius Philon. There survive a number of unnamed quotations regarding ethnic forms in various Etymologica and elsewhere, which sometimes provide more information than the corresponding entries in Stephanus, but it is a manifest oversimplification to suppose that all these entries derive from the full text of Stephanus. Stephanus and the Epitome were subsequently used by a few Byzantine writers, notably by Constantine Porphyrogennetus and the Continuators of Theophanes, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and above all, though last in time, by Eustathius in the twelfth.