A Roman by any other name...

There is a reason for me posting a picture of Titus "Phwoar" Pullo and Lucius Vorenus from Rome. It's not just random lechery ... Oh look, here they are again in wet tunics:

I wrote my first historical erotic short last week and it had an ancient Roman setting. Nor was this merely an excuse to watch the boxed set of Rome over from the beginning, even though I was very grateful for the excuse. The DVD has a special geek option that gives you extra historical information as you watch!

To write the story I had to come up with some character names: easy, huh? NOOOO. Roman names (at least among the upper echelons of society) were governed very strict rules. You can't just go round calling somebody Naughtius Maximus or whatever you like.

Here's Naughtius Maximus by the way. Actually its Michael Fassbender modeling for my escaped slave.

Roman names go like this (and bear in mind this is the simplified version). First for blokes: you start with a family name, which comes from your father and is your clan or gens. For example Julius would be a man of the Julii, Antonius would be a man of the Antonii etc. You get this when you're born. If you survive the first 9 days you're given a personal name such as Marcus, but this comes from a very very limited list - 98% of men had one of 17 personal names. Which means that the same bloody names were repeated throughout Roman history and modern researchers end up tearing their hair out trying to distinguish all the different people called Marcus Julius.


To back up the official names you might also get a cognomen, which is sort of a nickname - Caesar means "hairy", Tacitus means "silent", Cicero means "chickpea". As these nicknames eventually became hereditary (after all, sons would be named after their fathers), yet another nickname was added. In fact pretty much all the famous Roman names we know now are actually nicknames.


For women, it was a bit simplier. They didn't have personal names or nicknames, just family ones. So if your father was called Marcus Octavius Africanus you would be called Octavia. So would all your sisters. To distinguish girls they were given numbers: Octavia Prima, Octavia Secunda, Octavia Tertia etc. If anyone outside the family cared, you might also be known as Octavia Africana.

Why am I burbling on about this? Well, first to make the point that all this had to be looked into just to come up with a heroine, her father and her husband. And that pre-internet none of this would have been possible to find out without enormous research effort, and I simply wouldn't have bothered. Not for a short story. Praise Wikipedia, eh?

Standards do rise.

Last word on Roman Names goes, though, to Life of Brian: