What’s in a name?

I’ve always been told that the Acadians were a largely unlettered people, and that’s certainly true. So how did they come to give their children the names of Greek deities?
In practically every Cajun family tree there is someone named Achilles, Ulysses or Telesphore. I know there are several Hypolites and Theophiles (among other names) out on the branches of my tree.
When I wrote some years ago about these names from the Greek classics, Father Rex Broussard advanced the theory that it may have had to do with French rebellion against Catholicism.
“During the French Revolution,” he wrote, “there was intense anti-clerical, anti-Church sentiment. This began to be expressed by refusing to name children with saint names, and using what they would consider ‘non-Christian’ names from Greek mythology.
“How this practice gradually influenced our French Cajun culture is still a mystery to me,” he continued. “I would assume that our Catholic French culture in Louisiana would not have been so directly ‘anti-Catholic’ [but rather] it would have been ‘stylish’ in using the new way of naming babies. ... Nevertheless, your article brought back memories of my wondering as a young boy about how parents would think of names such as Hypolite Benoit, a real person from Youngsville, where I grew up.”
Several other readers pointed out that not all the classical names represented pagan deity and would not necessarily have been a part of the anti-clerical reaction in Revolution-era France. The Hypolite Benoit whom Father Broussard knew, for example, could have been named for Saint Hypolytus, who was a Roman martyr.
It does look like the names did not appear in Louisiana until about the time of the French Revolution, when aristocrats and others fled to New Orleans and into the bayou country. Several folks think the names entered Acadian family trees when Acadians and aristocrats intermarried in south Louisiana. Looking at my tree, it appears that most of the folks carrying Greek names were in fact born about the time of the Revolution (but precious few married aristocrats).
Dr. Edwin L. Stephens, first president of what is now UL-Lafayette thought the Greek pantheon may have been tapped for a much simpler reason — not everyone was as creative as, for example, Lastie and Perpetue Broussard of Abbeville, who gave each of their 15 children names beginning with “O”— Odile, Odelia, Olive, Oliver, Olivia, Ophelia, Odelin, Octave, Octavia, Ovide, Onesia, Olita, Otta, Omea. and Opta. They made Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not” for having done it.
“There is a very large number of classic Greek names among [the Cajuns],” Stephens wrote in a speech that is now housed in the university archives. “The parents were not learned themselves in classic lore, as a rule, but probably having almost run out of names (because of their extraordinarily large families), they may have left the choice of a name ... to the priest at baptism.”
That would tend to reinforce the idea that the names came from early martyrs, not ancient pagans.
However Stephens continued, “A curious fact is that I do not find these classic names among the ... Canadian families — those who remained in Nova Scotia. The characteristic seems to apply only to those Acadians of the exile.”
That would tend to reinforce the French Revolution theory, that is, pagans not martyrs.
Your guess is as good as mine. It could be none of the above.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.