Fireside Friday, November 22, 2024 (Roman Naming Conventions)

Hey, folks. Another Fireside this week! I had hoped to have the science fiction body armor post ready to go this week, but in addition to the continued work on the book project, I was asked to write a review of the now-out-in-the-USA Gladiator II and that consumed a fair bit of my time, pushing the science fiction body armor post into next week. Now the review itself will be coming out at some point in Foreign Policy. We are absolutely going to cover significant parts of this movie here as well because its history is bonkers but I’m going to leave most of that until later (probably waiting for the movie to hit streaming, so I can go through the battle scenes in detail) if for no other reason than that the nice people at Foreign Policy are paying me write this review for them and it would hardly be sporting to then post all my thoughts for free online before it even comes out.

That said, I did quip online that, “It has been 24 years since the first Gladiator film and in all that time, I see that Ridley Scott has still not learned how Roman names work.” Which is not something I had the words to get into in the FP review, so I suppose we can discuss that here!

Ollie, preparing to discuss how Roman names work from his fireside.

So for this this week’s musing, let’s talk about how Roman names work.

Roman naming conventions for the period of the republic and the early empire are actually quite formulaic: there is for the most part a system for forming Roman names, both male and female and it is as a result generally pretty easy to spot situations where some writer is trying to make something that sounds like a Roman name, but doesn’t actually know how those names form. And the form of Roman names mattered in Roman society: a name formed in the Roman fashion was, for instance, a key market of Roman citizen identity, to the point that individuals who gained Roman citizenship generally took up a Roman-style name.

For males, the Roman name was formed in a structure called the tria nomina (‘the three names’) which often gets shortened into English into the word ‘trinomen.’³⁹¹ The tria nomina consisted of three parts: the praenomen (‘before-name’), nomen (‘name’) and cognomen (‘after-name’), each of which has a standard form and purpose.

The praenomenwas the ‘given’ or personal name of an individual, given to them by their parents on the occasion of their ritual purification, typically about a week after birth. Generally every Roman male in a family would have a different praenomen, but the Romans are not creative when it comes to first names. There are roughly 30 common Roman praenomena, of which only about a dozen or so are frequent at any given time, with the result that Roman personal names are drawn from a very narrow pool. Further compounding this, it was common and expected with both families and larger clans (what the Romans call a gens) to reuse frequent family praenomina. Thus for instance, Appius Claudius Caecus (cos. 307, 296; dict. 285; cens. 312) – his grandfather was also Appius Claudius and so was his eldest son (Appius Claudius Russus, cos. 268) and one of his grandsons (Appius Claudius Pulcher, cos. 212) and three of his great-grand-sons (Appius Claudius Nero, praet. 195; Appius Claudius Pulcher, cos. 185; and Appius Claudius Centho, praet. 175). Indeed, there are so many Appius Claudius Pulchers that Wikipedia has a disambiguation page for just the important ones.

This naming convention actually indicates something quite important to know about the Romans which is that this is not a strongly individualistic culture, at least by modern standards. Romans are defined, in their names, mostly by being one more iteration of a family tradition and even the most individualistic part of their name – the praenomen – is a cookie-cutter nod to family traditions. The ideal Roman family was, in effect, one Appius Claudius after the next, each one quite a lot like his father, on and on forever.

Because there were only a handful of common praenomina it was common in writing to abbreviate them, since everyone knew what name you were indicating. Those abbreviations were standard and Wikipedia actually has a really handy list of them. Appius was Ap. or App., Lucius was L., Titus was T. and Tiberius Ti. and so on. Gaius is C. because G and C were, initially, not distinct letters in Latin writing (likewise Gnaeus is Cn.). If you needed to indicate a specific Appius Claudius Pulcher in antiquity, the standard form was to give the name of his father and possibly grandfather, so App. Claudius C. f. App. n. Pulcher is short for “Appius Claudius Gaii filius Appii nepos Pulcher” and so in English, “Appius Claudius, son of Gaius [Claudius], grandson of Appius [Claudius], Pulcher.” Modern scholars tend to instead specify figures in the republic by the highest office held, so we’d instead write this guy as Ap. Claudius Pulcher (cos. 143), which has the added ease of making it easy to find the person in the standard prosopographical reference texts, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic (1951; abbreviated as MRR)and the Prosopographia Imperii Romani (1897-2015, abbreviated PIR).³⁹²

The next name was the nomen, which was the masculine form of the name of a man’s gens or clan and you can tell by the fact that it’s just called the nomen (“name”) that this is a pretty core part of someone’s identity and marked an individual as a Roman citizen, but beyond that there’s not a lot to say. Its important, but not complicated.

The ‘last’ name(s) was the cognomen. Cognomina generally began as nicknames and usually self-effacing ones. However by the Middle Republic, we see that a lot of early cognomina have effectively frozen, marking instead significant branches of very large gentes. Thus for instance the gens Cornelia, the largest gens in Rome, had more than a dozen major branches, each marked by a standard cognomen: thus the Cornelii Scipiones, the Cornelii Sullae, the Cornelii Lentuli and so on. Thus Julius Caesar’s name (Gaius Julius Caesar) marks him as a member of the Julian gens and part of the Caesares branch of it.

That said, cognomina as nicknames also still occasionally happened, usually applied by the Senate based on major achievements. That can result in an individual with multiple cognomina, since they stack rather than replace each other. Thus the victor at Zama over Hannibal is Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus: He’s of the Scipio branch of the Cornelian gens and has the nickname Africanus, ‘the African’ to mark his victory in Africa over Hannibal.

A final quirk to note is that men from lesser, plebeian families might not have all three names, but only two: the praenomen and the nomen because they come from a gens that isn’t significant enough to have wide-reaching branches. Generally if you see a Roman man with just two names, like Gaius Marius or Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey), its safe to assume they’re a plebeian and from a relatively undistinguished family (in both cases these men are from wealthy families that were part of the Italian aristocracy but outsiders to the Roman aristocracy: the Marii were from Arpinum, the Pompeii from Picenum).³⁹³

Now that’s the system for Roman men. For Roman women, the system is both simpler and more frustrating. Early in the Republic, Roman women seem to have had regular praenomina, but were referred to in public by their nomen and by the Middle Republic female praenomina seem to have dropped away, leaving women with just their nomen as their entire name. Thus every woman of a given gens had the same name: the feminine form of the gens. Thus every woman born to a father of the Julian gens was just Julia. Now we know that these women often had nicknames and such to distinguish them (especially multiple sisters who would thus share a name), but one of Rome’s patriarchal attitudes is that it was generally impolite to talk about another man’s womenfolk in public and certainly to use their nicknames in public. So while we know that all of these women had more personalized names, they rarely come down to us.

When writers do have to distinguish, there are some standard forms. We tend to see two sisters distinguished as ‘Maior’ and ‘Minor’ (‘Elder’ and ‘Younger’); Julius Caesar’s sisters were thus Julia Maior and Julia Minor. We also see the use of diminutives to distinguish women, thus the wife of Augustus is often known as Livia Drusilla because her father was Marcus Livius Drusus. Chances are she had an elder sister who was just Livia and she was distinguished as “Livia-little-Drusus” (Drusilla being the feminine diminutive of Drusus). Roman women did not change their names when they married.

These rules remain very firm in the Middle and Late Republics, but begin to fuzz a bit in the imperial period, beginning with the names of emperors. Emperors had names, starting with Augustus (Imperator Caesar Augustus) which were more like titles, often taking ‘Imperator’ (‘victorious general’) as their praenomen. It also becomes common for emperors to take names connecting themselves to other, previous well-liked emperors, creating the friendly veneer of family continuity even when there was none. Thus, for instance, Domitian’s full regnal name was Imperator Caesar Domitianus Augustus, despite the fact that he is wholly unrelated to the Julio-Claudian family. As we get further into the empire, these names get increasingly baroque along with their references, generally reaching back to refer to popular, well-liked emperors. Thus the emperor Caracalla’s regnal name was Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, trying to draw a (fictive!) connection to Marcus Aurelius (Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus) and Antoninus Pius (Imperator Caesar Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Augustus Pius).³⁹⁴ Such names were intended to give a sense of stability, even when politics were far from stable.

For people who weren’t emperor, the rules hold longer. The first major fuzz we start to see in the second century A.D. as Roman elites start to adopt both paternal and maternal names (to emphasize the dignity of their heritage), leading to ‘binary nomenclature’ and thus increasingly long and complex names. Such names are still composed of the standard set of names, but with multiple nomina and cognomina drawn from different families, in some cases to an absurd degree over multiple generations. The other slow change is that family praenomina become even more standard and often begin to be repeated (e.g. multiple brothers all named Gaius or Titus or what have you), reducing their value for identifying individuals. As a result we start to see cognomina somewhat usurp the specification role of praenomina.

What really throws the system out is the Constitutio Antoniniana (213), an edict of Caracalla extending citizenship to all free persons in the Empire. Whereas a Roman-style name had previously been a clear market of Roman citizen identity, now almost everyone was a citizen. Following Roman tradition, new citizens took the nomen of the person who granted them citizenship (in this case, Aurelius) but when so many people all have the same nomen, it stops being useful and then stops being used, except on official documents.

That said, this all began with my quip that Ridley Scott has still not learned how Roman names work and we can show that neatly with his most famous Roman character: Maximus Decimus Meridius. Maximus isn’t a praenomen, but rather a cognomen, while Decimus is a regular Roman praenomen and we can assume then that Meridius is his nomen (a fictive gens Meridia). So his name should read Decimus Meridius Maximus, although Maximus, “the greatest” would be an astoundingly arrogant and foolish cognomen for anyone not an emperor to take.

While we’re here, in that famous scene he also declares himself “General of the Felix Legions” which is also not a thing. The Romans don’t have formal ‘armies’ to be generals of, but as discussed have legati in charge of either a single legion or an imperial province. Given that he’s leading armies in a battle on the Danube in what is presumably the Marcomannic Wars, our Maximus would probably have been the legatus Augusti pro praetore (and thus a senator), perhaps of Pannonia Superior, somewhat ironically Septimius Severus’ province (he’s the father of Geta and Caracalla, the villains of Gladiator II) before he seized power. And also the ‘Felix Legions’ are not a thing, but that’s a whole separate discussion of how Roman legions are named.

In any case, I have seen Gladiator II (my editor got me into a press screening): look for my review in Foreign Policy likely sometime this weekend or next week (I’ve filed it, its in editing) and I’m also looking forward to making an appearance on the Historians at the Movies (HATM) podcast to talk about the movie with Jason Herbert and Sarah E. Bond; unsure when that podcast will come out (we’re recording next week).

On to recommendations!

Meanwhile, just because my views on Gladiator II aren’t yet published that doesn’t mean that no one else’s are. I particularly liked Alexandra Sills’ first impressions and also a longer set of second impressions which gets into both the impressive bombast of the film but also some of the thematic elements that end up feeling a bit less pleasant if one stops to think about them (the film especially indulges in a lot of gay-is-evil coding, for instance). Sills also shouts out the battle scene at the beginning for analysis by ancient military historians and – well, it’s functionally pure nonsense and I think we’ll come back to pick that nonsense apart in more detail when the movie hits streaming and I can go through shot by shot. Sills – a scholar of the arena working on a book on gladiators – also has a piece with Working Classicists on the gladiatorial elements of the film and their plausibility.

For some historical fashion, in this case from Medieval Nubia (spotted via the always interesting Pasts Imperfect newsletter), Medievalist.net features work by the “Costumes of Authority” project showing off some truly spectacular modern recreations of elite medieval fashion from Nubia (today southern Egypt and northern Sudan). I mean, just look at what they’ve done, it’s really impressive:

This sort of recreation work is always astoundingly impressive to me, as it requires mastery of both the representational evidence, but also the materials and methods used to produce them. In any case, I’m particularly happy to see this done for a region of the world (medieval Africa) which rarely gets this kind of attention.

For this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to recommend L. Keppie, Slingers and Sling Bullets in the Roman Civil Wars of the Late Republic, 90-31 BC (2023). The first thing to note is that the book’s remit is a bit broader than the title implies, in that Keppie³⁹⁵ both reaches to earlier evidence from the Middle Republic and later evidence form the imperial period to frame his discussion of slingers and sling bullets. However, the focus is broadly on the Late Republic because that is the period from which we have a large corpus of surviving sling bullets, mostly in lead but also some stone and ceramic.³⁹⁶ The resulting volume is slim at just about 100 pages, but the pages are well-used and much of the archaeological evidence is new or only recently collected.

To me, the great virtue of the book is that while Keppie could have simply written a study of archaeologically recovered sling bullets, he aims a bit broader. The opening chapter covers the place of slingers in Mediterranean armies, pulling together the scattered evidence for their use and equipment. Slingers, like many light infantry troops, have a tendency to recede into the background of both ancient sources and modern scholarship, overshadowed by the more prestigious heavy infantry and cavalry. And to be fair, slingers were not often the decisive arm of any army in battle, but they were a common sight on ancient battlefields and especially in ancient sieges. As Keppie notes, certain regions were in particular noted for producing high-quality slingers, particularly Aetolia in Greece and the Balearic Islands and slingers from both locales show up from time to time as auxiliaries in Roman armies. A later chapter covers the evidence for slingers from the imperial period; we can know the Romans continued to use slingers as they appear as a dedicated troop-type in Roman artwork, even though auxiliary cohorts of slingers (funditores) are unattested, unlike the cohortes sagittariae (archers). Keppie argues, persuasively, for a native sling tradition in Italy and that legionaries may also at times have doubled as slingers and that sling bullet production may have been supervised by centurions (thus the Latin inscriptions).

The core of the book, however are six chapters covering the archaeological evidence for slingers – almost entirely the presence of sling bullets – in Rome’s mostly civil wars in the first century (though the presence of hundreds of sling bullets from the Siege of Numantia (133) is also noted). Sling bullets, particularly those cast in lead, often have messages inscribed on them, which can serve as a fascinating glimpse into the culture of common soldiers. Most such inscriptions simply indicate the unit to which the sling bullet belonged or the commander of its army, but we also get humorous and even vulgar inscriptions: acc[ipe], “take this!” or “pet[o] Octav[i]a culum” “I’m aimed at Octavian’s ass.”

The book is really well-produced, with lots of images, including archaeological drawings of inscribed sling bullets and slingers in Roman artwork but also comparative evidence (for instance coins that pick up the same visual motifs as sling bullets). Slingers and Sling Bullets is a volume that I think will be quite useful for a range of readers: it is easy enough to read for the enthusiast who wants to learn about slingers on ancient battlefields, but detailed enough (with enough notes) that advanced students and even specialists will find it a useful handbook on a topic that simply doesn’t get much attention in the scholarship.