Roman surnames are the surnames which were held by citizens of the Roman Republic and Empire. The basic tenets of how these were structured had been established by the middle of the first millennium BCE and continued to be used for a thousand years, down to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE. During that time their application expanded from a narrow geographical region in the city of Rome itself and the Latium region to being used all around the Mediterranean world as Rome’s power and empire grew. The manner in which the Romans created their surnames was a complex thing and indicates their great interest in tradition, heritage and ancestry.[1]
History of Roman surnames
Contrary to the myths which they themselves tried to foment concerning the origins of their city state, the city of Rome was not founded by Romulus and Remus in 753 BCE. Instead it emerged gradually as several villages that had been settled on the seven hills of Rome from as early as the eleventh century amalgamated into a town that then became a city over time. Exactly when during its early history the Romans began to develop their own individual surname practices is unclear, but it happened early and was well developed by the fifth century BCE, the first century for which we have any major documentary evidence pertaining to the Romans.
For centuries few people around the Mediterranean world or anywhere else would have been concerned with Roman naming conventions. That is until Rome began to expand rapidly as a major Mediterranean power in the third century BCE, becoming the pre-eminent power in Italy first, then in Hispania, southern Gaul and North Africa. In the course of the second and first centuries BCE the Romans conquered the Eastern Mediterranean and expanded north to the English Channel and North Sea.[2]
As all of this occurred, they bestowed Roman citizenship on favoured subjects and these in turn adopted Roman surnames as they became citizens. Then, in 212 CE, all free people of the Roman Empire were granted Roman citizenship. With this, Roman naming practices expanded to apply to an even larger group of people. Yet even as Emperor Caracalla was issuing this citizenship law in 212 CE structural flaws were appearing in the Roman Empire which would eventually destroy it over the next two and a half centuries. As it collapsed in the fifth century, Roman surnames and naming conventions largely disappeared, though elements of them were retained by the elites of the city of Rome and some other Italian cities for centuries to come, preserving their understanding of themselves as civilized ‘Romans’ in a world of barbarians.[3]
Roman naming conventions
The naming conventions which the Romans spread around the Mediterranean world over a period of more than half a millennium were complex. They involved most people having three names. The first component of these was the praenomen or personal name. This was followed by the nomen gentilicium, often rendered simply as the nomen. This is the closest thing to a surname in the Roman system and was the name of one’s gens, the name for a family or clan.[4] Finally, the third part of the naming system was a cognomen, a kind of additional personal name, one which approximates to a kind of descriptor surname.[5]
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Let’s take a famous example to illustrate this. To the modern world the man who did the most damage to the Roman Republic, and paved the way for its destruction by his great-nephew, was called Julius Caesar, or often just Caesar. But his full name was Gaius Julius Caesar. Gaius, the part of his name which is rarely used today, was actually his praenomen or personal name. Then Julius was his patronymic surname or nomen, one which indicated he hailed from the gens Julia or Julii. Finally, his cognomen was Caesar. This became heritable in his family’s instance, as subsequent members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty adopted Caesar as a cognomen widely.[6]
Finally, to further complicate matters, an individual could acquire a fourth name. This was a kind of honorary surname or descriptor name, one which was given to someone who had achieved a great feat in some respect. For instance, Publius Cornelius Scipio, a leading Roman general of the Second Punic War (218 BCE – 201 BCE), had the name Africanus bestowed on him after he defeated the Carthaginians in the climactic battle of that war at Zama in North Africa in 202 BCE. This was called an agnomen or ‘victory title’. Another example is Nero Claudius Drusus, a stepson of Emperor Caesar Augustus, who was given the agnomen Germanicus in recognition of his role in conquering parts of Germania for the Roman Empire.[7]
Most common Roman surnames
It isn’t possible to reconstruct exactly which Roman ‘surnames’ were the most common, owing to a lack of detailed census records, but we do have a good idea of which of the gens or clans hard the largest impact on Roman history. The following were some of the most powerful:
- The gens Valeria – One of the most powerful and ancient patrician families, they provided consuls and senior magistrates from the earliest days of the Republic and eight centuries later were still prominent, the Emperor Diocletian being a member of the Valeria.
- The gens Cornelia – While members of the gens Julia destroyed the Roman Republic, the gens Cornelia were surely its greatest family, supplying at least 75 consuls (the Roman equivalent of an annual prime minister) between 509 BCE and 27 BCE.[8]
- The gens Julia – The clan or family of Julius Caesar. The nomen became very common in imperial times as it was acquired by many people who obtained Roman citizenship in service to the Julio-Claudian dynasty.[9]
- The gens Claudia – The other side of the first imperial dynasty, the Julio-Claudians, in the later part of the Roman Republic many scions of this family became controversial populists in Rome’s politics.[10]
- The gens Aurelia – A plebeian family of ancient Rome from at least the third century BCE, the Aurelia are the second most consequential family in Rome’s imperial family. Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher emperor, his son Commodus, and the members of the Severan dynasty were all members of the gens Aurelia, meaning this family provided most of Rome’s rulers between 161 CE and 235 CE.
Famous Romans
- Gaius Julius Caesar – Julius Caesar was a dictator of Rome between 49 BCE and 44 BCE. He did not become emperor, but he did pave the way for his great-nephew Octavian to become Emperor Caesar Augustus in 27 BCE.[11]
- Livia Drusilla – The mother of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, Livia was Augustus’s wife. Augustus’s successors in the dynasty were actually more the product of her first marriage to Tiberius Claudius Nero than Augustus’s offspring.[12]
- Marcus Tullius Cicero – The great orator and rhetorician of the first century BCE.[13]
- Marcus Ulpius Trajanus – The man who became Emperor Trajan in 98 CE and ruled down to 117 CE. He conquered Dacia (modern-day Romania), the Nabataean Kingdom in modern-day Jordan and much of the Parthian Empire. The Romans later considered him to be their greatest emperor, having extended the empire to its maximum extent.[14]
Explore more about Roman surnames
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- Ancient Roman Names. Maria Milani - Ancient Roman History
- Roman Names. Behind the name
References
- ↑ Benet Salway, ‘What’s in a Name? A Survey of Roman Onomastic Practice from c. 700 B.C. to A.D. 700’, in Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 84 (1994), pp. 124–145.
- ↑ M. Cary and H. H. Scullard, A History of Rome: Down to the Age of Constantine (Third Edition, London, 1980).
- ↑ Myles Lavan, ‘The Spread of Roman Citizenship, 14 – 212 CE’, in Past & Present, No. 230 (February, 2016), pp. 3–46.
- ↑ R. B. Steele, ‘Roman Personal Names’, in The Classical Weekly, Vol. 11, No. 15 (February, 1918), pp. 113–118.
- ↑ A. E. Douglas, ‘Roman Cognomina’, in Greece & Rome, Vol. 5, No. 1 (March, 1958), pp. 62–66.
- ↑ Catherine Rubincam, ‘The Nomenclature of Julius Caesar and the Later Augustus in the Triumviral Period’, in Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 41, H. 1 (1992), pp. 88–103.
- ↑ A-gnōmen. A Latin Dictionary
- ↑ John Jacobs, ‘Cornelii Scipiones, family and tomb of’, in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (Third Edition, 2013).
- ↑ B. Levick, ‘Julians and Claudians’, in Greece & Rome, Vol. 22, No. 1 (April, 1975), pp. 29–38.
- ↑ George Converse Fiske, ‘The Politics of the Patrician Claudii’, in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 13 (1902), pp. 1–59.
- ↑ Gaius Julius Caesar. Livius.org
- ↑ Livia_Drusilla. World History Encyclopedia
- ↑ Cicero. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- ↑ Trajan. World History Encyclopedia