Two other once-popular ways of exploiting names for social history, by contrast, have fallen out of favor. Certain names and classes of name were often borne by slaves, since their names were given or changed at will by their owners, who may not have liked to allow them dignified names.Plato, Cratylus, section 384d (translated by Harold N. Fowler) Perseus Digital Library But no names or very few were so borne exclusively, and many slaves had names indistinguishable from those of the free; one can never identify a slave by name alone.E. Matthews, article 'Names, Personal, Greek', in S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth (eds), The Oxford Classical Dictionary ed. 4 (2012), 996. Similar arguments apply to so-called "courtesans’ names".
