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Home , Praenomen

A cabiNeT of V V RoMAN CuRiosiTieS



Strange Tales

and surprising facts

from the world’s greatest empire

vvvvv

J. C. McKeown

2010 • 17 Praenomina do not quite correspond to our fi rst names. If that were so, would probably not have adopted the praenomen Imper- ator (“Commander”). Nothing illustrates the low public status of women so vividly as do their names:

• Th ey were usually known simply by the feminine form of the family nomen; hence the daughters of Iulius Caesar and Tullius Cicero were called Iulia and Tullia , respectively. • Not even the daughters of the grandest families had a praenomen, though Maior , Minor, Tertia , Quarta , and so on (“Elder,” “Younger,” “Th ird,” “Fourth”) would be used to distinguish between sisters, or between nieces and aunts. • In the late Republic, it became frequent for women to be known by the feminine form of the family nomen and by the in the genitive case—the form of the denoting possession; hence Tullia Ciceronis (“the Tullia of Cicero”). In modern Greece, an unmarried woman’s is the family name in the genitive case, and most Slavic countries have a comparable system. • Roman women generally did not change their name when they married. Many married women referred to in inscriptions do have the same name as their husbands, but this is presumably because they had both been slaves in the same household, or because freedmen and -women had married their former owners.

Curious forms such as Gaipor , Lucipor , Marcipor (= Gaii puer , Lucii puer , Marci puer; literally, “the boy of Gaius,” “the boy of ,” “the boy of Marcus”) attest that in early times slaves had little . Later, they had a single name, but their owner’s name might be appended—as, for example, Felix Antonii (servus ), “Felix, the slave of Antonius.” Th ere was a broad range of slave names, a large propor- tion of which were Greek. If a slave was freed, he typically took the praenomen and nomen of his ex-master, but retained his as his cognomen.