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For a variety of reasons, women's praenomina became neglected over the course of Roman history, and by the end of the Republic, most women did not have or did not use praenomina. They did not disappear entirely, nor were Roman women bereft of personal names; but for most of Roman history women were known chiefly by their nomina or cognomina. [1]
Among the elite, names such as Pomponia Graecina became common. In still later generations, women's names bore little or no resemblance to their father's familial names. For example, in the Flavian dynasty, Titus's daughter was not Flavia. In the Severan dynasty, most women bore the first name of Julia, even if it was not the family's ...
Many of the cognomina used by women originated as praenomina, and for much of Roman history there seems to have been a fashion for "inverting" women's praenomina and cognomina; names that were traditionally regarded as praenomina were often placed after a woman's nomen or cognomen, as if a surname, even though they were used as praenomina.
No Roman gentes began with "X", and the letters "Y" and "Z" occurred only in names borrowed from Greek. The letter "W" did not exist in Classical Latin. Nomina are given in the masculine form—the form borne by all male members of a gens.
Moya K. Mason, Ancient Roman Women: A Look at their Lives. Essay on the lives of Roman women. "Wife-beating in Ancient Rome": an article by Joy Connolly in the TLS, April 9, 2008 "An etext version of: Ferrero, Guglielmo. "Women and Marriage in Ancient Rome." The Women of the Caesars. The Century Co.; New York, 1911.
Even the most famous Romans can be problematic: Caesar usually means Julius Caesar, but this cognomen was later used by all Roman emperors. The problem is not unique to Wikipedia: the Oxford Classical Dictionary has an appendix of alternative names by which some Romans are known, while the Prosopographia Imperii Romani and Pauly-Wissowa use a ...
The nomen gentilicium (or simply nomen) was a hereditary name borne by the peoples of Roman Italy and later by the citizens of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. It was originally the name of one's gens (family or clan) by patrilineal descent. However, as Rome expanded its frontiers and non-Roman peoples were progressively granted ...
The gens (plural gentes) was a Roman family, of Italic or Etruscan origins, consisting of all those individuals who shared the same nomen and claimed descent from a common ancestor. It was an important social and legal structure in early Roman history .