Talk:Roman naming conventions

message: I'd like to insert somewhere that all(?) other branches of Indo-European had a tradition of dithematic given names, i.e. consisting of two words whose meanings are usually known: Naga-rajan, Bogu-slav, Gunn-hild, Demo-sthenes.  Where does this fit?  And are there any dithematic Roman names?  —Tamfang 00:44, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: We now say all of the Mediterranean world, which (as I misunderstand) is accurate as to Egyptian but less so for Semitic languages, whose two-part names seem to be mostly god-name + attribute. —Tamfang (talk) 23:58, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  dithemes 

message: The SCA reference is linked at the bottom of the page; why include it three times in the main text?  I'm going to remove those.  If you put them back, remember, only one set of brackets for an external link.  —Tamfang 21:31, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  outer linkage 

message: I've always wondered if there's any information on what a Roman person would be called by close family members (parents and spouses) and close personal friends (especially during childhood when formality is far less common).  It seems that with so few Praenomens being used, and with the other names also belonging to so many other people within the same family, it would be very difficult to make a casual reference to a specific individual.  Did they perhaps have another name, an everyday name that was commonly spoken but considered far to casual and unofficial to ever be included in written documents? --Icarus 18:31, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Informal names 

message: We currently claim the following:
:The pattern was even more slowly adopted by the non-patrician families, with the first examples of cognomina for the plebians dating to c. 125 BCE and not becoming popular for another century.
This is simply not true, if by "plebeian" we mean what it actually meant at the time - i.e. "all families that were not part of the hereditary patrician caste, and including many well known senatorial families."  The list of consuls here, which shows patricians in blue and plebeians in red, starting in 300 BC, shows plebeian consuls with cognomen from the very beginning.  At the very least, one can note the plebeian consuls of the early Second Punic War - Tiberius Sempronius Longus and Gaius Terentius Varro, both of whom obviously had cognomina (and Varro, at least, is normally called "Varro," rather than "Terentius" - the other I've seen alternately called "Sempronius" and "Longus."  Later Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus most certainly was a plebeian (he was Tribune of the Plebs) and died in 133 BC.  The cognomen "Crassus," of the likewise plebeian Licinii, shows up in205 BC...so this statements seems to be wrong. We should not say "plebeian" when we do not mean it in the proper sense - we should say "commoners" or "those outside the senatorial elite"
Secondly, as far as I can tell, these naming rules only work particularly well up to the early principate.  From the 2nd century AD onwards, we seem to be entering a world of completely incomprehensible naming, if List of Roman Emperors is any guide.  Certainly, by the time of the Tetrarchy, names have completely stopped making sense based on the customary naming rules.  I'd say this starts at least with the early Julio-Claudians, who pretty quicly stopped having normal praenomina - they start having praenomina like "Drusus" and "Nero" which are, to my mind, cognomina.  (Drusus the elder had "Nero" as his praenomen, and "Drusus", a cognomen associated with his mother's Livian gens, rather than his own Claudians, as his cognomen.  How on earth did that happen? Names in 38 BC were still mostly fairly normal, as far as I can tell. Why didn't he get a sensible name like "Gaius Claudius Nero?" On the other hand, his father's father was apparently named "Drusus Claudius Nero", so now I'm utterly confused - the Drusus name was associated with, as I said before, the Livii.  Livia herself was a Claudian by blood, but a Livian legally, as her father was of the Claudius Pulcher family, but was adopted by a Livius Drusus.  But that would suggest that the "Drusus" name had no prior connection to the Claudius Neros at the time that Tiberius Claudius Nero's father somehow ended up with it as a praenomen...So I'm just completely confused now.  john k 18:27, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cognomen and late Roman naming 

message: I can't recall ever running across anything on how an illegitimate child would be named?  Romulus, for example, was called in some early references "Romulus Silvius," after his mother.  But was that a proper Roman form?
--Al-Nofi 22:46, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Query 

message: Like modern aristos, prominent Romans sometimes used cognomia as first names, beginning in the 2nd Century BC.  I recall a kinsmen of the great Aemillius Paulus bore "Paulus" as a praenomen.  AP had given two sons to be adopted, and then lost the remaining two, thus having no male offspring.  It was a way of preserving the name of a noble but extinct line.  Sort of like "Tweed Roosevelt," Teddy's several times great-grandson, or Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather.  
This seems to have become acceptable in the late Republic and early Empire.  And when you get into the middle empire, all the rules seem to fall apart.
--Al-Nofi 22:52, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Regarding Cognomen and late Roman naming 

message: This article is very sexistic. In some of the first paragraphs the word "people" are used instead of "male romans". Wasn't the Roman women people too? How the Romans regarded women should not be copied to the structure of this article. The article needs a total rewriting to meet the NPOV standard. It would be best dviding this article in two; one summary article dealing with male and female name on a NPOV basis and breaking some of the material out in order to form a new article about roman male naming conventions in harmony with the existing roman female naming conventions article. 217.208.68.17 (talk) 23:04, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sexistic POV 

message: I read somewhere that it was the Roman custom that the fifth son would be called Quintus, the sixth Sextus, etc etc.  Is that true, and if so, shouldn't it be mentioned here? --Michael C. Price talk 19:46, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Quintus, Sextus etc

message: : By the late Republic, women also adopted the feminine form of their father's cognomen, e.g., Aquilia Severa was the daughter of Aquilius and married a Severus (in her case, both of her names are derived from nomina).
How does a woman who used her husband's nomen exemplify the use of a father's cognomen?! —Tamfang (talk) 06:22, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  women and cognomina 

message: Grblomerth recently changed "gens Octavia" to "gens Octavius".  Now, Octavius is not himself a gens; nor is this the appropriate adjective that goes with gens.  Perhaps there's another justification for this change? —Tamfang (talk) 03:23, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: No? Then I'll change it back. —Tamfang (talk) 19:14, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  tne gender of ''gens'' 

message: : ... cognomen Octavianus (shortened to Octavian) ...
The parenthesis was added recently.  Does it merely mean that Octavian is the usual English form (in which case I'd remove it), or – I ask with excess caution – did that shortened form exist in Latin?? —Tamfang (talk) 17:09, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  shortening 

message: I understand why Titus Flavius Vespasianus (the father, R 69-79) known as Vespasianus, because it's his   cognomen.  but why his son, Titus Flavius Vespasianus (R 79-81) known on his praenomen; Titus, -  and not on his cognomen; "Vespasianus"? (Sorry for my bad English) Israel Krul (talk) 22:24, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry I had to fix some of your words, but I kept the sentence intact. I think his son is "known" -- as in "known in the 21st century" -- simply as "Titus" for brevity's sake. But by what name is he "known" in his time, I don't know. Having translated this article to Indonesian, I have to say that the Romans are weird! Bennylin (talk) 07:07, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

text: Tiberius and Gaius (Caligula) were also known by their praenomina.  What emperors were known by is kind of random, because their cognomina as emperor was always "Caesar" or "Augustus." john k (talk) 15:44, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Titus]] VS [[Vespasianus]] 

message: What happened to names later on in the Mediterranean?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.139.86.185 (talk) 13:36, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: The evolution of names in Italy from the familiar tria nomina was a complex process with a number of steps. The first one, mentioned in the article in its current form, was the rise of polyonomy in the 2nd century. Then, as the praenomina came to be fossilized, it fell out of use in the fourth & fifth centuries. Reaching the post-Imperial period, however, examples of naming become much fewer, so we have to guess at what happened. Some obvious trends include the introduction of German names, & the simultaneous discarding of the gentilica due to rise of prestige for Germanic ideals & a loss of prestige for Roman ones. (This is the primary reason why it is practically impossible to connect any modern lineage with those of the ancient world.) By the Late Middle Ages -- when records become more numerous -- most people were content with using one name, although often with some kind of modifier at the end, indicating place of origin or their livelihood. -- llywrch (talk) 19:53, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Later developments? 

message: ...is that it assumes the tria nomina formula is THE Roman naming convention. In fact it is the naming convention from the late Republic to the early Imperial period only. There is a lot of confusion in the questions and answers above regarding the later period. Unfortunately, I don't have the time, but someone needs to incorporate into the article Benet Salway's piece "What's in a name? A survey of Roman onomastic practice from c.700b.c. to 700 a.d." ("Journal of Roman Studies"  Vol.84, 1994, pp.124-145). It would dispel much of the above misconceptions and confusion. 109.152.78.43 (talk) 15:47, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Started work on that. Work in progress. DeCausa (talk) 20:57, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The problem with this article... 

message: For the record, this edit, though made without an edit summary, corrected an inconsistency of era style, which seems to have been established as BC/AD. Since era style generates an unfathomable amount of acrimony, I just wanted to note for the sake of clarity that this seems to have been an entirely legitimate edit for consistency. Cynwolfe (talk) 16:24, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Era 

message: An article from 1992 by Paul Gallivan (of the University of Tasmania) has just reached me, which furnishes some interesting new information: he took the time to collect over 11,000 Roman male names of the 1st three centuries AD -- primarily Senatorial & Equestrian -- & group them by date & organization of the name (i.e., names w/o cognomina, those in tria nomina structure, two gentilica, & polyonymous), thus showing how the naming convention changed over those 3 centuries. This study is not only exhaustive -- there are 4743 senatorial names, of the 8,000 estimated to have lived in those centuries, 4823 equestrian names, which are all known at the time -- but likely not to be superseded for many years. It provides some definite information on the general trends in naming conventions for that period -- which is rare for the ancient Greco-Roman world. I'd like to integrate the tables from this article.However, doing this might require a reorganization of the article, which is why I've opened this section. What would be the best way to do this? Thoughts? -- llywrch (talk) 20:07, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Quite difficult to answer that question without having read the article.  I think it's available through Cambridge online, for which I was approved through the Wikipedia Library back in March, but the instructions for accessing that source never arrived.  This seems to be a familiar problem, as it's the second Wikipedia Library source that's done exactly the same thing, and others seem to have encountered this, but there's no information I can find on how to resolve the problem.  Is there any other way I can access this source?  None of the libraries near me seem very interested in keeping up-to-date on "ancient history", so it's highly unlikely I can access it through conventional means.  P Aculeius (talk) 11:41, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  Send me an email thru the link on the left side of my user page. -- llywrch (talk) 21:05, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  Hey, I know it's a little bit late (just a little), but... did this ever get to anything? I have also acquired the paper and I think it would be a nice addition to the article. Tintero21 (talk) 00:39, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Integrating new material 

message: Might be worthy to note, referring to note vii, that back in the old world, ehnicity and religion regularly correlated. The Hebrew term for "gentile" is גוי GOY. GOY originally (biblicaly) meant people. Later on the plural form GOYIM spread tremendously as a clear distinction between the Hebrew Goy and the world's Goyim.
I figured if Gentile Roman-originally meant Clan-Family-Race, People (גוי in Hebrew) would fit well alongside.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gezellig~hewiki (talk • contribs) 14:13, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Gentile' term and non/jewish distinction 

message: I'm deleting all the illustrations that aren't Roman—they don't illustrate nomenclature and they aren't even Roman. There are ample illustrations actually made in the Roman era available on Commons, including literally hundreds of inscriptions that demonstrate nomenclature. It's been several years since I've looked at this article, but it seems to me that ten years ago, it was perhaps not entirely adequate but far more useful for people just coming to understand Roman naming practices. Cynwolfe (talk) 12:13, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Illustrations