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classicschronicles · 2 years

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Hi lovelies,

In class the the other day we were discussing the Aeneid and somehow we ended on the topic of Cicero’s name really meaning ‘Chickpea’ and, well obviously, I had to know more about how on earth he even got that name, and so todays entry is about nomenclature in the Roman Republic and Empire, otherwise known as the ‘Tria Nomina.’

At first glance the Tria Nomina is an extremely convoluted system- why does one man need SO many names? Why are there a million men in one family with the same name? Well, it wasn’t always like this. In pre-republican days when the Roman Empire was still under the control of the Etruscan overlords, most Roman-male citizen just had the one name but the naming process became increasingly complicated as time went on. By the time of the Republic all aristocratic men had three names- split into praenomen, nomen and cognomen.

Marcus | Tullius | Cicero

Praenomen | Nomen | Cognomen

Gaius | Julius | Caesar

The praenomen was the first part of a name and was the ‘personal name’ chosen by the parents of a young Roman child and given to the child during a naming ceremony, which was later reaffirmed at your marriage ceremony. The praenomen was used primarily within the family or by close intimates but was usually abbreviated in inscriptions. Shockingly, there were a very limited number of praenomina and the same name was often used multiple times within the same family. The eldest son was often named after his father with second and third sons being names after an uncle or other male relatives. Sometimes boys were named after male relatives from their maternal family- brining a new name into the gens (clan). The naming of a son after his father served to emphasis the continuity of a family across many generations, and also to distinguish one gens from another. Roman men were usually known by their praenomen to members of their family and close friends, whilst by those outside of the this circle, they may be referred to by their nomen or cognomen.

During the time of the Empire, the praenomen became increasingly confused with practices of the aristocracy, with emperors often using ‘Imperator’ was their praenomen, whilst at the same time retaining their own praenomina. But, due to the fact that most early emperors were legally adopted by their predecessors, and formally assumed new names, even these were subject to change. Many members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty would swap their initial praenomen for a cognomen, or would receive their cognomen instead of the praenomen at birth. Due to the complicated nature of these practices, the uses of the praenomina to distinguish between men went into decline, only propped up by tradition. Over the 3rd century, written records of the praenomen became increasingly sparse and from the 4th century onwards it became almost entirely obsolete.

The nomen was the name which belonged to the gens and was hereditary- it’s what we today would consider the equivalent of a surname. The gens consisted of your extended Roman family, all of whom would share the same nomen, and would claim its origin from a common ancestor. To Romans, the gens were almost like a state within a state, consisting of its own scared rites and establishing family laws (which were binding on its members). It was used to refer to the man in informal conversation and between friends if the man had no cognomen.

The cognomen was the third and (at last!!!) the final element of the tria nomina, and acted as an addition of the personal name. In the early years of the republic, some aristocratic Romans had as many as three cognomen (bc ofc three names wasn’t already enough). The cognomen could arise from any number of factors (characteristics, place of work/ birth, looks personality etc…) and were often used as nicknames. My favourite example of a cognomen was that of Cicero- meaning chickpea- either because of his dappled skin or because an ancestor of his had a nose that resembled a chickpea. Unlike the nomen, the generational name, a cognomen could appear and disappear almost at will and were usually not chosen by the person they referred to- which would account for the presence of harsh or unflattering cognomina. Under the empire, the use of the cognomina increased dramatically and where previously only distinguished houses had multiple names- it was now commonplace for all Romans to have multiple names. For the majority of the Republic the usual of distinguishing someone was via the nomen, but as the praenomen began to lose value, the cognomen began to replace it.

Whilst the nomen was a required element of the tria nomina down to the end of the empire, its usefulness declined over the course of the imperial times and an increasingly larger number of people became known by their nomina, which gradually shifted to become akin to the cognomina. By the 3rd century the cognomen became the most important part of Roman nomenclature. By the 6th century, as Roman institutions began to vanish, the differences between the nomen and the cognomen ceased to have any importance and by the late years of the empire, the western empire reverted to single names- which were indistinguishable from the cognomina that they replaced.

As per usual, the women in this have faded into obscurity and we largely assume that the tria nomina refers to men. The case with women was that they would adopt the family nomen, but with a feminine ending. For example, the women of the Julio clan would be referred to as Julia, and women in the Claudio clan would be referred to as Claudia. Notice how I say women, plural. Meaning your first daughter would be Julia, your second daughter would be Julia and your third daughter would be (you guessed it) Julia. Rather confusing if you ask me.

Hope you all enjoyed learning about Roman nomenclature- or the tria nomina. Have a lovely weekend!

#classical studies #classics #dark acamedia #ancient rome #roman reigns #roman empire #roman republic #etymology #greek mythology #roman mythology #name suggestions #history #nomenclature

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cherryblossomsno1fan · 3 years

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more meaningless sk8 headcanons

reki and langa's favorite duet to dance in just dance is can't take my eyes off of you

oka is reki's uncle (mom's brother)

reki tries to give shadow the intimidating talk when he starts dating oka but he fails really hard and ends up laughing his ass off while shadow is just there Confused

cherry named carla after his niece who he loves a lot (i can elaborate on this further)

reki is a harry styles bisexual

reki listened to sweater weather before he knew that it was kind of a bisexual song and one day he was just listening to it with earbuds on and one of his classmates said "hey are you listening to sweater weather?" and he's like "yeah i love this song!" and they're like "oh my god same! are you also... you know?" and he's like "what" and they're like "what" and they explain to him and he's like "oh. wait-" and he just kinda reevaluates his whole life and then a week or so later he comes up to this classmate and says really proudly "i DO listen to sweater weather!" and they immediately understand and they hug bc yay two bisexuals

shadow has a really bad amount of internalized homophobia and it's a huge fucking problem and it never really leaves

reki introduces miya to his sister bc they're around the same age and they become really good friends (their main hobby is gagging at reki and langa and making fun of reki)

joe doesn't actually believe in astrology but he pretends he does just to piss off cherry, who thinks astrology is the dumbest shit ever

everyone thinks shadow's music taste is rock/metal music because of his aesthetic but one day miya used his phone for spotify and found out that he listens to a bunch of dancey songs and shit like that from the 90's (like britney spears,,, yknow)

half italian joe half italian joe hALF ITALIAN JOE GODDAMNIT

adding to ^ that, joe listens to a bunch of old italian songs and often plays them in the restaurant (HELP NO MATCHABLOSSOM BRAIN WENT "lol them slow dancing to old italian songs lol think about it")

joe unironically listens to macarena and has to do the dance every time. it's his legal obligation. he has to do it every time he hears it. no matter where he is.

cherry knows this and has carla play the macarena during one of their beefs and joe is like "FUCK YOU" but does it anyways

they both lost in the end because cherry lost his shit laughing (they both fell at the same time so it was considered a tie)

miya wouldn't stop giving them shit about it for weeks because they both literally looked like complete wrecks (cherry almost broke his leg and joe did, in fact, dislocate his elbow), like he would look at them and burst out laughing

one time miya laughed so hard at them that he fell from his chair face first and broke his nose which is the only reason he stopped laughing (it hurt to laugh, literally)

reki is so used to kissing his sisters' minor injuries when they like fall or scrape their knees that it's become a habit and while this does open up renga opportunities please let me enlighten you with the idea of Big Bro Reki treating one of miya's scrapes (either a tumble or he tripped or smth idk man bear with me) and accidentally smooching his arm or smth out of habit and miya kinda cries a little

also, this angsty shit is brought to you by my gf who likes to make me SUFFER: after reki and langa's fight, one of his younger sisters sees that reki is really upset and crying, so she goes up to him and kisses his chest to make him feel better

ITALIAN JOE TIME ok so joe's mom is italian and when she met his father she didn't really know much japanese and her pronunciation was so weird so instead of calling his father by full name she called him "joe" for short (and it was easier for her to pronounce) and when he was born it kind of became a little nickname his mom gave him

reki listens to paramore NO i am not taking criticism on this

when they were like kids cherry and joe promised to each other that at their weddings, they would be each other's best man; skip to when they got engaged, joe is like "oh no,,, oh my god we didn't think about this did we" and cherry thinks that he wants to call off the engagement and kinda panics for a few seconds but then joe said "who will be our best men??" and cherry is like "OH THAT'S WHAT YOU MEAN-" and then kinda smacks him for scaring him but also is really mushy inside that joe remembered

whenever joe speaks to cherry in italian (complimenting him and being romantic and all that) cherry immediately assumes that joe is insulting him and gets mad (when really he's telling him his eyes are beautiful)

whoops accidentally made this one about the Matchablossom Agenda oh well promise there'll be more tadashi and adam content in the next one

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awed-frog · 5 years

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in which caesar doesn’t do anything much and all the women are named julia

[Hi, this is me stanning Adrian Goldsworthy’s biography of Caesar. I studied Classics, but not this period, so all I can contribute here are squeals of delight, a few mistakes and the occasional witty comment. If you’d like to know more, please buy the book - it’s really good and a fun read.]

PART 2

The thing is - there’s a lot of boring relevant political stuff going on in this chapter, but I’m mostly fascinated by the glimpses we get into the world of Roman women.

As I said, this is not really my area, so I know random, unconnected facts about how life was like for them; also it doesn’t make much sense to talk about ‘Roman women’, because, as a reminder, ‘Rome’ stretches from the 14th century BC to the 14th century AD, came to include dozens of very different regions, and obviously was home to an incredibly diverse population. And if we’re talking about the late Republican / imperial aristocracy, there’s a sharp divide anyway: on the one hand, the ‘ideal woman’ is the same old model we’re all used to and heard about (silent, obedient, virtuous, chaste, a perfect mother and so on), but on the other, Roman noblewomen had a lot more freedom than, say, their Greek counterparts, so there was usually some political scheming going on - something that in Greece was reserved to a handful of very well-placed courtesans.

(In this sense, think about the contrast between Lucretia, the mythological wife of Collatinus, whose fridging created the Republic, and Agrippina, mother of Nero, empress and all-round badass bitch.)

Anyway, this chapter made me think about women because it starts with Caesar being born and getting his name - it’s sort of an urban legend, btw, that every single Roman had three names: that was just for the Moste Noblest - and how Goldsworthy casually mentions that, unlike men, women of noble birth would just take their family surname as first name. In Caesar’s family, for instance, all the women were named Julia.

(As a reminder: his given name was Caius, then ‘Julius’ identified the tribe, and finally ‘Caesar’ was a nickname that was possibly given to his grandfather for something elephant-related.

People whose grandfathers did not do elephant-related stuff generally never enjoyed the prestige of a funny nickname passed down through the generations.)

So it’s bad enough that twins might be named ‘Peter and Not-Peter’ or ‘Peter and Twin’, but imagine going to the park with your buggy and meeting your old friend Oldest She-Jones (daughter of Ferdinand Jones), now married to George David Taylor, and her five kids - Louis David Taylor, She-Taylor, She-Taylor the Second, She-Taylor the Third and She-Taylor Born on Christmas. So damn cute, and also the reason why the Romans never developed smartphones or social media - how the hell are you supposed to find someone on Vultocodex when every single cousin and aunt has the exact same name?

Poor management, that is.

But anyway - as I said, there’s a dissonance here because women being treated like garbage (like, not given normal names and married off at fourteen) also led to the very peculiar phenomenon: generations of (male) politicians and VIPs being raised by very forceful, strong, and ambitious (widowed) mothers. Because if you count old age, wars, trampolining injuries (let’s be honest, men have always been obsessed with attempting dangerous stunts just for the fun of it) and the general risks of Roman politics, it was very usual for a noble kid to not even remember his father at all.

(Nero is a good example of how weird and all-consuming this boy-mother relationship could become - there’s entire books about it, but I’d point 16-and-over readers to Suetonius’ Life of Nero for details.

Keep in mind 95% of it is propaganda because Suetonius hated Nero, but still. HBO-worthy stuff in there.)

All this to say - we know that Caesar had a very close relationship with his mom (named ‘Aurelia’ because - you guessed it - she came from the Aurelii family), who was a near perfect figure of virtue, intelligence, beauty and common sense. Very powerful in her own right, Aurelia raised Caesar basically on her own, because her (much older) husband was either away at war or dead for most of their marriage.

Aside from drinking in Aurelia’s wisdom, Caesar’s education also included the normal lessons noble Roman boys were required to learn: self-worth, narcissism, delusional manias, rhetoric, martial arts, horse-riding, and writing really bad fanfiction based on Greek myths.

And now for the MEANWHILE part.

(I have no idea why this gif was tagged ‘meanwhile’, but I’m not enough of an idiot to let it go to waste, so.)

Meanwhile, all sort of messes were going on.

As I’m sure you remember, at some point the consul was Marius - Caesar’s uncle and a military genius, but not much of a politician. His negotiation tactic of choice was secretly inviting groups of unconnected people to his house on the same night, serving them dinner in two separate rooms so they wouldn’t see one another and try to work out some kind of agreement between them. Whenever a new point came up, Marius would say he had diarrhoea, pretend to run to the bathroom and instead sit down with the second group and see what they thought about the first group’s proposal.

(Isn’t ancient Rome magnificent?)

A big problem Marius had to deal with was how to grant citizenship to the allied tribes in Italy without pissing off current citizens. Basically no one wanted these other guys to be given new rights, but since they supplied more than half the soldiers of the Roman army and got nothing in return, their patience was running a bit thin. At some point, Roman bureaucrats started to erase foreign-born citizens from their lists claiming they were not actual citizens (something so openly dishonest NO OTHER GOVERNMENT would EVER attempt it again), and next yet another tribune working on a citizenship reform was stabbed to death in the street.

So the allies went to war.

(This war, confusingly, is known as the Social War, because ‘socius’ means ‘ally’ in Latin.)

As you can imagine, it was a disaster. Most of the allied communities had been part of the Roman republic for I don’t want to check but let’s say decades, they lived side by side with Roman families and fought in the same wars, so it was more of a civil war than anything else. Some tribes chose to remain faithful to Rome, others didn’t. Lots of people died.

Caesar was too young to be a soldier, but this was Cicero’s first taste of war (bet you never thought of that weaselly weasel as a soldier, uh? appearances can be deceiving, folks!). Marius was also involved, but since he was old as shit and had famously weak and leaky guts (hahahhaha), he mostly stayed out of active combat, which wasn’t all that normal for a Roman general. In the end, the whole of Italy, down to defeated tribes, cows, dogs and random patches of mossy rocks, was granted citizenship and everyone went home. Their votes, however, were inserted in the system in such a way that they didn’t count much.

On the whole, the one winner of this war was Lucius Cornelius Sulla, one of the military commanders, who became a consul soon after.

Another war, because this is Rome and Romans were dicks, but! this one was in the East, which means every single soldier would get super rich and also! wars in the East were considered easy because *insert racist trope here* and! Sulla had been promised that, as the big winner of the Social War, he could go there with his legions and basically enjoy this Disneyland of golden cups and ultraviolence but! at the last moment, Marius, who never liked Sulla much, managed to snatch the commandership from him, which! was completely legal but also *insert outraged emoji* and wait for it! instead of going gentle into the good night, Sulla made a fiery speech to his soldiers all like GUESS WHAT FOLKS WE’RE STUCK HERE SCRATCHING OUR TESTICULI AND THOSE IDIOTS FROM THE 25TH ARE TAKING YOUR GOLD AND YOUR UNWILLING WOMEN and! Sulla’s entire army marched! on! the! city! of! Rome!

It was the first time a Roman army had ever invaded Rome. Nobody was expecting it, and people panicked. Sulla’s men won easily, burned down some buildings, killed some people, generally had a great time; and then Sulla announced a bounty for anyone who’d disembowel his political enemies (including Marius) because he didn’t have time to go to Braavos and learn how to do it himself (remember, he still had his war waiting for him in the East).

(This turned out to be a success, btw. One guy was even killed by his slave - Sulla gave him the promised reward, then shoved him off a mountain because duh, slave and “When I said ‘anyone’, I meant people, not IKEA furniture” and “Honestly”.)

As nobody could have imagined and/or predicted, as soon as Sulla left for Greece Weak Guts Marius came back with an army and took back the city, beheading his way to the Senate and leaving a trail of blood wherever he passed. As soon as he got there, however, he dropped dead - heart attack, trampolining, diarrhoea, who can tell - and the city was taken over by his second-in-command, Lucius Cornelius Cinna.

(Man, what a ride.)

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know what Caesar was doing during this time.

Personally, I like to imagine him in Rome - a well-dressed, grey-eyed 15-year-old, freshly orphaned, horrified and exhilarated by the violence exploding all around him - I see him running down the streets, stopping to watch the corpses float in the dark waters of the Tiber, daring his friends to go and touch the severed heads nailed to the doors of the Senate; recognizing many of those heads as friends and colleagues of his father and uncle (passing a hesitant finger on the cold flesh, remembering how they’d once laughed and frowned and spoken about boring matters from the dais).

The truth is, Caesar was just a kid. He was supposed to learn about the Republic, and his own role in making it great, by watching his elders.

God knows what he actually learned, and what he thought, as he was passing through Rome’s paved streets, now shimmering with blood.

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#julius caesar #ancient rome #history #classics #antiquity #adrian goldsworthy #book rec #history crack #sort of #elephant boy #problematic fave

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