Praenomen

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Praenomen

See Praenomen (Ancient Egypt) for the pharaonic throne name.

In Roman naming conventions

Roman naming conventions

By the Roman Republic and throughout the Roman Empire, a name in ancient Rome for a male citizen consisted of three parts : praenomen , nomen and cognomen ....
, the praenomen (literally forename, plural praenomina) was the only name in which parents had some choice, roughly equivalent to the given name

Given name

A given name is a personal name that specifies and differentiates between members of a group of individuals, especially in a family, all of whose members usually share the same family name ....
of today. It was a personal appellation given to a male infant on his day of lustration

Lustration

Lustration has two meanings, historical and modern.Historically ? It was the term for various ancient Greek and Roman purification rituals.Modern ? In the period after the fall of the various European Communist states in 1989 ? 1991, the term came to refer to the policy of limiting the participation of former communists, and especially in...
. As a rule only the immediate family would call a person by his praenomen.

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See Praenomen (Ancient Egypt) for the pharaonic throne name.

In Roman naming conventions

Roman naming conventions

Given name

Lustration

Prefix

A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. The word "prefix" is itself made up of the stem fix , and the prefix pre- , both of which are derived from Latin root s....
prae- ("before") and nomen ("name"). For most of Roman history, women did not have a praenomen (see the section on use of praenomina below).

Number and frequency of praenomina

Compared to most cultures, Romans used very few given names: the common praenomina were fewer than 40. The 17 most common male praenomina accounted for 98% of all male Roman names. The most popular – Lucius, Gaius, and Marcus – constituted 59% of the total.

Praenomina are in the o-stem (nominative in -us). Many of the praenomina used by male citizens were abbreviated to one or two characters in writing or inscriptions; the more common abbreviations include: Appius (Ap.), Aulus (A.), Flavius (Fl.), Gaius (C.), Gnaeus (Cn.), Decimus (D.) Lucius (L.), Manius (M'.), Marcus (M.), Publius (P.), Quintus (Q.) Servius (Ser.), Sextus (Sex.), Spurius (Sp.), Titus (T.), Tiberius (Ti.).

For a time in the 3rd century the nomen Aurelius became one of the most popular praenomina, after the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Caracalla

Caracalla

Caracalla , born Lucius Septimius Bassianus and later called Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus, was the eldest son of Septimius Severus and Roman Emperor from 211 – 217....
) granted universal Roman citizenship to all freeborn subjects throughout the Empire as new citizens adopted the name of their emperor in gratitude.

The names Primus, Secundus, Tertius, Quartus, Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, Octavius, Nonius, and Decimus mean, respectively, 'first', 'second', 'third', 'fourth', 'fifth', 'sixth', 'seventh', 'eighth', 'ninth', and 'tenth', and were originally given to first, second, etc. sons in birth order. There are, however, abundant examples of this birth-number significance being later lost: for example, Sextus Pompeius

Sextus Pompeius

Sextus Pompeius Magnus Pius, in English Sextus Pompey , was a Ancient Rome general from the late Roman Republic . He was the last focus of opposition to the Second Triumvirate....
was not a sixth son. A possible explanation for this is that the numerical praenomen came instead to stand for the number of the month in which the person was born. Another explanation is that eventually parents thought the names were euphonic

Euphony

Phonaesthetics is the claim or study of inherent pleasantness or beauty or unpleasantness of the phonetics of certain linguistic utterances....
, and names such as Decimus

Decimus

Decimus was a Ancient Rome Roman naming convention. It means "tenth", and was originally used as a name for tenth sons, but it was later used as a generic name....
no longer had to be the tenth child or born in December, and had become common names.

Use of praenomina

Some gentes

Gens

In ancient Rome, a gens was a clan, caste, or group of families, that shared a common name and a belief in a common ancestor. In the Roman naming convention, the second name was the name of the gens to which the person belonged....
used only a few praenomina, and some praenomina in turn were used only in one gens. For example, the Cornelii named almost all their sons Gnaeus, Lucius, or Publius. This is partly due to the practice of the pater familias
Pater familias

for the episode of Ghost Whisperer, see Pater Familias.The pater familias was the highest ranking family status in an Ancient Rome household, Patriarchy....
naming infants after himself.

It was a Roman tradition for senatorial decrees to outlaw certain families from using certain praenomina. Livy

Livy

Titus Livius , known as Livy in English language, was a Ancient Rome historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, from its founding through the reign of Augustus in Livy's own time....
relates how in the 4th century BCE Marcus Manlius Capitolinus was tried and condemned for treason. It was decreed that no member of the Manlia gens might thereafter bear the praenomen of "Marcus" which none did until the 1st century CE.

Normally, only close friends and families would use the praenomen, while outsiders used it for mock-intimacy (sarcasm). The Greeks, until the 1st century, tended to use the praenomen alone when referring to Romans.

In the earliest period, Italic praenomina had female versions, which often end in -a (e.g., Larthia for Larth). But by the time of the historically attested Republic, women no longer normally had praenomina. Exceptions were women in the imperial family, who were often given the name Julia (especially wives of the emperor, but occasionally sisters and mothers as well).

Praenomen

Number and frequency of praenomina

Use of praenomina

See also