ao3tagoftheday:

ao3tagoftheday:

ao3tagoftheday:

[Image Description: Tags reading “lmao I should really title my chapters BUT WHAT, I’m so bad at titling I’ll probably name my first born Chapter One”]

The AO3 Tag of the Day is: Please take this opportunity to ask me about Roman naming practices

Ok, welcome to another episode of our ongoing series, Mod EJ Nerds.

The Romans literally numbered their children. Literally. Like, they basically did the equivalent of naming children Chapter One. It worked like this:

A Roman man had two or three names, a personal name, a clan name, and sometimes a sort of family nickname. Let’s take, for example, a man named Quintus Caecilius Metellus. Suppose this man has a daughter. Her name would be Caecilia. Suppose he has a second daughter. Her name would also be Caecilia. How do you tell them apart? Well, the oldest daughter is called Caecilia Prima and the younger daughter is called Caecilia Secunda. If he has a third daughter, she’d be Caecilia Tertia. So yeah, the daughters’ names are essentially Caecilia One, Caecilia Two, and Caecilia Three.

But EJ, I hear you cry! You said the Romans numbered their children, not just their daughters! What about the boys? Well, the boys got a little more variety in their names, but not much more. There were only about 12 common Roman first names for boys by the Late Roman Republic. 12 names. For everybody. And what were those names? Remember our friend Quintus Caecilius Metellus? His first name, Quintus, was one of the more common Roman first names. It means five. Other common first names included Sextus (six), Septimus (seven), Octavius (eight), and Decimus (ten). Most scholars believe that the Romans used to number their sons the same way they did their daughters, but that the strict numbering of sons fell out of usage before we have good written records, leaving only the number-names behind, independent of their original meaning.

So yeah. Go right ahead and name your first born Chapter One. The kid will probably end up conquering the Mediterranean.

I’m getting a lot of comments asking about the idea that Romans would name twins [name] and anti-[name]. I’ve never heard of this, and some quick research turns up no evidence of it. The only historical set of Roman twins I can think of the top of my head are Lucius Cornelius Sulla’s children, who were named Faustus Cornelius Sulla and Cornelia Fausta. This was something of a departure from normal naming practice, but the departure was in order to honor Sulla’s patron deity, Fortune, not because they were twins. So no, I don’t think the [name]/anti-[name] thing is true.