Latin / Roman Name Generator

How the Latin / Roman Name Generator (Praenomen, Nomen, Cognomen) works

How the Roman name generator works

A Roman citizen of the classical period bore the tria nomina, three names. The praenomen was the personal name and there were only about a dozen in common use, Gaius, Lucius, Marcus, Publius, Quintus, Titus, so it was abbreviated, C. for Gaius by an old spelling, L., M., P., Q., T., and passed from father to eldest son with little variation; families used two or three of them at most, and the Claudii were the only gens with Appius. The nomen, or nomen gentilicium, was the name of the gens, the wider clan, Julius, Cornelius, Claudius, Valerius, Tullius, Aemilius, Fabius, ending in -ius, inherited from the father and shared with every member of the gens, patrician or plebeian. The cognomen began as a nickname, Rufus red-haired, Crassus fat, Cicero chickpea, Brutus dull, Naso big-nose, Strabo squinter, Caecus blind, Scaurus swollen-ankled, Cunctator the delayer, and became hereditary, marking a branch of the gens, so the Cornelii Scipiones and the Cornelii Sullae were different families with the same nomen. A fourth name, the agnomen, was earned, a victory title like Africanus, Asiaticus, Germanicus, Macedonicus, or a personal epithet, Magnus, Pius, Felix, and was not inherited except by a son of the great man. The Patrician option draws on the old families that held the consulship, the Cornelii, Claudii, Fabii, Aemilii, Valerii, Manlii, with their famous cognomina; the Citizen option spreads across the gentes of the late Republic and early Empire including the plebeian nobility, the Tullii, Antonii, Licinii, Pompeii, Octavii.

Women had no praenomen at all in the classical period. A daughter was called by the feminine of the gens name, Julia, Cornelia, Claudia, Tullia, and if there were several she was Julia Major and Julia Minor, or Prima, Secunda, Tertia, Quarta. She might carry a feminine of the father's cognomen, Caecilia Metella, Livia Drusilla, Vipsania Agrippina, Valeria Messallina, and in the Empire two nomina from the two sides of the family. A slave had a single name, given by the master: a Latin quality or ordinal, Felix, Fortunatus, Primus, Secundus, Faustus, Hilarus, Felicula, Fausta, or a Greek name whether or not the slave was Greek, Eros, Hermes, Philippus, Onesimus, Chloe, Phoebe, Zoe, because Greek was the language of the household staff. On manumission the freedman took the praenomen and nomen of his former master and kept his slave name as a cognomen, so Cicero's secretary Tiro became Marcus Tullius Tiro, and the Freedman option produces exactly that; a freedwoman became the feminine nomen plus her old name, Tullia Felicula. It is the single most useful thing to know about a Roman name in an inscription, since a Greek cognomen after a good Roman nomen almost always means a freedman or his descendants.

The system loosened in the Empire, praenomina fell out of use, and by the third century a citizen might carry a string of nomina from every side of the family, while Marcus Aurelius appears as a nomen for millions given citizenship in 212. For the Greek names the slaves carried, the Ancient Greek page; for what Latin names became, the Italian, Spanish and French pages; for the medieval afterlife of Rome's names, the Medieval page.

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