How Roman Names Worked
Roman naming conventions are among the more counterintuitive aspects of the culture for modern readers, and the confusion they generate is not merely academic. Understanding Roman names is understanding something important about Roman identity, social structure, and the relationship between the individual and the family — a relationship that was organized very differently from the modern Western model.
The classical Roman name for a male citizen of the Republic consisted of three parts: the praenomen, the nomen, and the cognomen. The praenomen was the personal name — the equivalent of a first name — but it was used almost exclusively within the family. Romans did not address each other by praenomen in public contexts. There were very few praenomina in use — approximately eighteen were common, and many families used only two or three across generations — which meant that they were not functionally distinctive at any scale beyond the household. The praenomen was abbreviated in writing: Gaius became C., Marcus became M., Lucius became L. (confusingly, since Gaius was abbreviated C rather than G, a legacy of archaic Latin spelling).
The nomen was the clan name — the gens, the extended kinship group. Iulius identified a member of the Julian gens; Claudius identified a Claudian; Cornelius a Cornelian. The nomen was the socially significant identifier in public contexts, the name that located a person within the Roman social structure. Knowing that a man was a Cornelius told you something about his family’s history, its political connections, and its general social position. The great senatorial families — the Julii, the Cornelii, the Aemilii, the Fabii — were defined by their nomina, and membership in these gentes conferred social capital that the praenomen and cognomen elaborated but did not create.
The cognomen was the third element, and it was the most varied and in some ways most interesting. Originally an additional personal identifier appended to distinguish branches of a gens that had grown too large for the nomen alone to differentiate, the cognomen became hereditary and eventually the most practically distinctive element of the name. Cognomina were often strikingly literal physical or behavioral descriptions: Cicero means chickpea, probably a reference to a physical mark on an ancestor’s nose. Caesar may mean hairy. Brutus means heavy or dull. Rufus means red-haired. Scaurus means with large ankles. The Romans named their ancestors for their physical peculiarities with an unsentimental directness that their descendants then carried for generations regardless of whether they had any chickpeas on their faces.
Women’s naming conventions were notably simpler and reveal something unflattering about Roman attitudes toward female individuality. Women used the feminine form of the family nomen — a Julius’s daughter was Julia, a Claudius’s daughter was Claudia — and when a family had multiple daughters, they were distinguished by numbers or modifiers: Julia Prima and Julia Secunda, or Julia Maior and Julia Minor. Women did not use praenomina in the classical period. The individuality that the three-part name granted men — however limited by the small stock of praenomina — was simply not extended to women, who were identified primarily as family members rather than as individuals.
The system was further complicated by adoption, which was socially and legally significant in Rome. An adopted son took the adoptive father’s full tria nomina and added his birth family’s name in a modified form — Octavian, born Gaius Octavius, became on adoption by Caesar’s will Gaius Iulius Caesar Octavianus, the last element marking his Octavian origin. He subsequently dropped Octavianus from common use and after his political victories styled himself Gaius Iulius Caesar, before eventually becoming simply Augustus. The management of name and title was a political act as much as a personal one.
Slaves had single names — often Greek, often deliberately exotic or diminutive, chosen by their owners. Freed slaves took their former master’s praenomen and nomen and appended their slave name as a cognomen: a slave named Felix freed by Marcus Tullius Cicero became Marcus Tullius Felix. This convention meant that large populations of freed slaves bore the names of the senatorial families who had owned them, which created interesting social complications as liberti rose economically while carrying the onomastic markers of their former servitude.
The later Empire saw increasing informality and variation, partly through the influence of provincial naming conventions and partly through the extension of citizenship in 212 AD to millions of people who adopted Roman names in ways that did not always follow classical convention. By late antiquity, single names were increasingly common among the upper classes as well as the lower. The elaborate three-part system had served a social function specific to the Republic and early Empire — distinguishing families within a relatively small citizen body where gentes were the organizing social unit. As that world changed, the names that had mapped it changed too, in ways that mirror the larger transition from a Roman world to the medieval one that followed.