When In Rome

I thought I would post something halfway educational today, as opposed to my usual palaver.

I do this not out of a sense of pedagogical duty, but mostly because I'm waiting for the rice to finish cooking and I can't really do anything food-wise until the rice cooker makes it characteristic klunk-twing sound.

Let's look at Roman names for a moment. We see that most Roman men had three and sometimes four names, but we'll just deal with three. And let's take a very famous example: Gaius Julius Caesar. What are these various name fragments all about? Without clouding the issue with a bunch of technical Latin like pranomen and cognomen, we'll say the three name fragments correspond to the private name, the tribe, and the nickname.

Here, Gaius is the man's private name, a name likely to used only by his mother, closest friends, and wife. Anyone else using it would be in danger of being altogether too chummy - it's like when a guy in an elevator calls you son; you feel yourself bristle because he's invading your nomological space.

Julius, in this case, is the tribal name, equivalent to the last name in modern America if you accept the proviso that the last name represents some kind of now-lost tribal affiliation. The Smith tribe, if you like.

But there weren't all that many tribal names in Rome, so it was possible, and perhaps even probable, that in any batch of 100 random citizens you'd have more than one Julius or more than one Pompey. And since the son almost always took the private name of his father, well, you're guaranteed to have at least people going by the same name. Since if you can't use the private name to distinguish them, what do you do?

You resort to the nickname, the third fragment of the name, which often expresses something about the individual. Caesar, for example, means "curly-haired" or just plain "hairy". Pulcher means "beautiful". Crassus means "fat". One of my favorites is Cicero, which bizarrely enough means "chick pea" (and I can't begin to imagine what about the famous orator and senator reminded anyone of a chick pea).

So if one wanted to hail Gaius Julius Caesar in a crowd, you'd shout out "Hey, hairy man of the Julius tribe!', or, in Latin, "Heyus, Julius Caesar!"

Note that Caesar never meant emperor or principate. It just meant "curly-haired" or, perhaps, "hairy". So when someone later on referred to himself as Caesar, it was to simply to wrap himself in the glory of C. Julius Caesar, whether he had hair or not. (Confusingly enough, the Roman often abbreviated the private name in inscriptions, but for Gaius they used C. instead of G. I have no idea why, except maybe that C. is easier to carve into stone than G. But I'm just guessing.)

Let's pretend that a particular President became hugely popular, so popular that his very name came to stand as a label for perceived effectiveness or greatness. You'd hear people shouting "Hey, I'm the Truman of this meeting, so you all sit down and shut up!" Or politicians would run for Roosevelt - "I'm by far the most qualified candidate for Roosevelt, so give me your votes before I burn your damn huts down."

The situation for Roman women was both simpler and more complicated. They only had one name, and it was almost always the feminized version of the father's private name. C. Julius Caesar's daughter, for example, was named Julia (generally speaking, if the name ends in an "a", it's in the feminine or diminutive form).

But what happens of the man has more than one daughter? Since they're all supposed to be named after the father, how do you conduct orderly household affairs when you've got for daughters all named Julia? Here you give them unofficial nicknames, unlike the "official" nicknames given to men. And they're much more prosasic. First Julia, Little Julia, Big Julia, that sort of thing.

Oh, it must have been grand to be a woman in ancient Rome. "Hey, Big Julia, get over here, C. Julius the Hairy wants to talk to you."

And one final thought: the word Caesar is not pronounced the way we pronounce it. It is pronounced the way the Germans pronounce it: Kaiser.