Pseudanor was a Macedonian

Ancient Macedonian language

Ancient Macedonian was the language of the ancient Macedonians. It was spoken in the kingdom of Macedon during the 1st millennium BCE and it belongs to the Indo-European group of languages...

 epithet

Epithet

An epithet or byname is a descriptive term accompanying or occurring in place of a name and having entered common usage. It has various shades of meaning when applied to seemingly real or fictitious people, divinities, objects, and binomial nomenclature. It is also a descriptive title...

 applied to Dionysus

Dionysus

Dionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. His name in Linear B tablets shows he was worshipped from c. 1500—1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks: other traces of Dionysian-type cult have been found in ancient Minoan Crete...

. Other Macedonian appellations to the god were Agrios (Ἄγριος) "wild" (as god of the countryside) and Erikryptos (Ἐρίκρυπτος) "completely hidden" (as the god hidden from the frenzied women roaming the countryside -see the Proitides and the Minyades

Minyades

The Minyades were three sisters in Greek mythology who were daughters of Minyas, and the protagonists of a myth about the perils of neglecting the worship of Dionysus...

- by the kourotrophos Kala Thea, the Beautiful Goddess, and raised as a girl: the transition to pseudanor).

All of the names of Dionysus above are attested in four inscriptions from Beroea

Beroea

Beroea is:*Veria , a city in northern Greece*a former name of Aleppo, Syria*mentioned in Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War; I,61,2...

 c. 248-264 AD. However the history of Pseudanor was certainly much older. The Macedonian

Macedonia (Roman province)

The Roman province of Macedonia was officially established in 146 BC, after the Roman general Quintus Caecilius Metellus defeated Andriscus of Macedon, the last Ancient King of Macedon in 148 BC, and after the four client republics established by Rome in the region were dissolved...

 historian Polyaenus

Polyaenus

Polyaenus or Polyenus vs. e]]; , "many proverbs") was a 2nd century Macedonian author, known best for his Stratagems in War , which has been preserved. The Suda calls him a rhetorician, and Polyaenus himself writes that he was accustomed to plead causes before the emperor...

 relates an aetiological myth

Origin myth

An origin myth is a myth that purports to describe the origin of some feature of the natural or social world. One type of origin myth is the cosmogonic myth, which describes the creation of the world...

:

"In the reign of Argaeus

Argaeus I of Macedon

Argaeus I of Macedon was a king of Macedon of the Argead dynasty from about 678 BC to about 640 BC. He succeeded in the throne his father Perdiccas I. Argaeus left as successor his son Philip I...

, the Illyrian

Illyria

In classical antiquity, Illyria was a region in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula inhabited by the Illyrians....

 Taulantii

Taulantii

Taulantii was the name of a cluster of Illyrian tribes. According to Greek mythology Taulas , one of the six sons of Illyrius, was the eponymous ancestor of the Taulanti. They lived on the Adriatic coast of Illyria , between to the vicinity of the city of Epidamnus...

 under Galaurus invaded Macedonia. Argaeus, whose force was very small, directed the Macedonian virgins (parthenoi), as the enemy advanced, to show themselves from mount Ereboea ( Ἐρέβοια ). They accordingly did so; and in a numerous body they poured down , covered by wreaths, and brandishing their thyrsi

Thyrsus

In Greek mythology, a thyrsus or thyrsos was a staff of giant fennel covered with ivy vines and leaves, sometimes wound with taeniae and always topped with a pine cone. These staffs were carried by Dionysus and his followers. Euripides wrote that honey dripped from the thyrsos staves that the...

 instead of spears. Galaurus, intimidated by the numbers of those, whom instead of women he supposed to be men, sounded a retreat; whereupon the Taulantii, throwing away their weapons, and whatever else might retard their escape, abandoned themselves to a precipitate flight. Argaeus, having thus obtained a victory without the hazard of a battle, erected a temple to Dionysus Pseudanor; and ordered the priestesses of the god, who were before called Klοdones by the Macedonians, to ever afterwards be distinguished by the title of Mimallones."

The Klodones and the Mimallones are also mentioned by Plutarch

Plutarch

Plutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...

 in his vita

Biography

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...

of Alexander the Great, one of his Parallel Lives

Parallel Lives

Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, commonly called Parallel Lives or Plutarch's Lives, is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings, written in the late 1st century...

. The aetiological myth in Polyaenus may have originated or been adapted in the Aitia

Etiology

Etiology is the study of causation, or origination. The word is derived from the Greek , aitiologia, "giving a reason for" ....

('Causes") of Callimachus

Callimachus

Callimachus was a native of the Greek colony of Cyrene, Libya. He was a noted poet, critic and scholar at the Library of Alexandria and enjoyed the patronage of the Egyptian–Greek Pharaohs Ptolemy II Philadelphus and Ptolemy III Euergetes...

, but Polyaenus mentions both important points: Dionysus

Dionysus

Dionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. His name in Linear B tablets shows he was worshipped from c. 1500—1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks: other traces of Dionysian-type cult have been found in ancient Minoan Crete...

' ambivalent sexuality and the manlike qualities of the Maenads. This female-male-female transvestite

Transvestism

Transvestism is the practice of cross-dressing, which is wearing clothing traditionally associated with the opposite sex. Transvestite refers to a person who cross-dresses; however, the word often has additional connotations. -History:Although the word transvestism was coined as late as the 1910s,...

ritual (it was only natural that Dionysus presided over it) of the Klodones-Mimallones probably marked the transition of the Macedonian girls to adulthood.