In the Talmud, who is Plimo?

Question

In Menachos 37a, there is a part which involves someone named "Plimo" (פלימו):

בעא מיניה פלימו מרבי מי שיש לו שני ראשים באיזה מהן מניח תפילין א''ל או קום גלי או קבל עלך שמתא

Plimo asked Rabbi: If someone has two heads, on which one does he place the tefillin? He said to him: Either leave, or regard yourself under a ban.

Plimo also appears in Kiddushin 81a through 81b, in another quite humorous story involving him and the Satan, and there he is called a Tanna. He most likely appears elsewhere in the Gemara too, but I don't know where else off-hand.

I was wondering who Plimo is, so I did a simple Google search and the Hebrew Wikipedia page for פלוני came up, mentioning פלימו, which caught my eye. There the page said:

."אצל חז"ל מוזכר לעתים תנא בשם "פלימו" – ויש שהסבירו שאין זה שם אדם מסוים, אלא כינוי כדוגמת "פלוני

In Chazal, a tanna is sometimes mentioned as "Plimo" - and some have explained that this is not the name of a certain person, rather it is a nickname such as "Ploni".

(For those who are not familiar with the term "ploni", it is the Hebrew equivalent to "John Doe".)

Who is Plimo? There certainly must be some who consider him to be a Ploni, but is there anyone who tries to identify him, perhaps similar to יש''ו where some say it is an acronym and others say the acronym is also a name (Yeshu) and refers to you know who?

Answer 1

The Sefer Yuchasin mentions Plimo as someone in the times of Rebbe. This is echoed in the Seder Hadoros, and R. Reuven Margoliot in his investigation into Talmudic names and nicknames (לחקר שמות וכנויים בתלמוד) takes this to mean that there was a specific person at that time whose actual name was Plimo.

However, R. Margoliot then develops a basis that Plimo is just the equivalent of Ploni (as asserted in the question). He notes that in Berachos 48a where Plimo is mentioned, there is an alternate version documented in the Dikdukei Soferim which says Palmoni (פלמוני). R. Margoliot suggests that Plimo is an abridged form of Palmoni and cites Daniel 8:13 where Palmoni is the equivalent of Ploni. According to this, then, Plimo is not actually a name; it is simply a designation for an unnamed figure.

One potential issue with this is that the Dikdukei Soferim does not say פלמוני. Rather, it says פלומנו.

Answer 2

Guggenheimer: "Abba Palaemon: A Tanna of the fifth generation; in Babylonian sources he appears as פלימו. In Soṭa 1:2 (fol. 16c), corresponding to Babli 4a, his name is Minyamin (a form of Binyamin). [Palaemon, Greek Παλαίμων, name of a sea-god, also epithet of Heracles a. o., also used in Roman times (e. g. Remmius Palaemon, Roman grammarian in the time of Tiberius and Claudius.) Because of the acoustic similarities between Palaemon and its counterpart Binyamin in the parallel passages, the Greek name might be a כינוי for the Biblical name, which would explain the apparent discrepancy. On the use of specific, traditional substitutes, כינוים, for a person’s Hebrew name, see also E. & H. Guggenheimer, Jewish Family Names and their Origins, an Etymological Dictionary, Hoboken N.J. 1992, pp. xiv–xv; Etymologisches Lexikon der jüdischen Familiennamen, München 1996, p. xv. (E. G.)]"