Why I don’t like the term ‘tria nomina’

If you’ve ever studied Roman history, you’ve probably come across the term trial nomina. This literally just means “three names”, but it’s used more broadly to mean the kind of name that indicates that a person has Roman citizen status, whether from birth or after being freed from slavery. Typically, these names have a praenomen (first, given name), gentilicium (inherited family name) and cognomen (could be given or inherited, depending on time period and circumstances). For example, Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Tullius Cicero both have these kind of names – and written like this they do indeed have three parts.

There are few reasons that the term ‘tria nomina’ doesn’t work for me, however.

Problem number one: these names didn’t actually have three parts. When written in the most formal way, for example on a tombstone or legal document, they had four. What’s missing from the three parts given above? The filiation formula – that is, the father’s praenomen. So, formally speaking, Caesar was wriiten Gaius Julius C.f. Caesar (Gaius Julius son of Gaius Caesar). That’s four bits. If you want to get really emphatic that you’re a citizen, you can also add an abbreviation of your voting tribe after the filiation – I’m not sure Caesar would have bothered, but plenty of newer citizen families did.

This is not just pedantry on my part (I think). The filiation is a very important element of figuring out citizen status, and what kind of citizen you were. A freeborn citizen would have an F for filius or filia (though we’ll come back to women’s names), but a freed slave would have an L for liberties/liberta, and the praenomen abbreviation would be the master’s not the father’s. This is a key factor in how a Roman name shows status, but the idea of tria nomina brushes the filiation aside as additional rather than fundamental to the structure.

Problem number 2: the three name system is not so much fleeting, as non-existent: there is no period where it actually applied to everyone (or even to all men). Benet Salway covers this in his much-cited article ‘What’s In a Name?‘, in which he shows that three names was basically a transitional stage between two names as a norm (praenomen and gentilicium) and a different two names as a norm (gentilicium and cognomen), with multiple cognomina later becoming very common. Over time, as cognomina became the names most people were actually known by, the praenomen dropped out of use completely.

But it’s not just that the praenomen/gentilicium/cognomen thing doesn’t last long – it’s that it wasn’t ever universal. It was most common among the aristocracy in maybe the first century BCE or first century CE. But at that time there were still some Roman aristocrats with only two names (e.g. Marcus Antonius) and there were people with more than one cognomen long before this (e.g. Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus in the third century BCE). There were also people who were known by different combinations of names even on major inscriptions (e.g. Marcus Agrippa, who as far as I can tell didn’t often use his gentilicium and was widely known as Agrippa). Around this time, it was also still common in less wealthy families to have two names only (e.g. Agrippa’s brother, who was just called Lucius Vipsanius).

In other words, the standard answer that tria nomina was normal for a short (but important) period in Roman history doesn’t quite capture the fact that it was never universal in any period at all.

Problem number 3: “three names” never really applied to women. As many people are aware, praenomina died out for women long before they did for men. Women did eventually come to be known by cognomina which were given at birth, but for a while the standard was one name only (unless there were multiple sisters, in which case they might be differentiated by Prima/Secunda/Tertia). Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, has one name only, as far as I know (hence why we tend to specify who we mean using her sons’ names). Julia (daughter of Augustus) also has no other name. Interestingly it’s the next generation of the imperial family that starts getting a bit more creative – her daughter, whom we normally call Julia the Younger, was actually Vipsania Julia Agrippina, combining names from both her mother and father’s side. This kind of thing started to get a long more common in the early empire, as Salway shows.

So even when women start to get multi-part names, it’s never really in the format of the tria nomina, strictly speaking, because they do not have praenomina. This even leads to a strange symbol in the name formulae of freed slaves whose former owners were women – you can see it in the image below. There is no praenomen to put in this slot, and so it has to be substituted with a generic symbol meaning ‘woman’ – which really shows how entrenched it is that women have a blank spot where a praenomen should go. Do scholars tend to use the term tria nomina for women or not? I’m sure I’ve seen it used, though personally I think it would be confusing to use it in this way. It’s tricky, because women are being named within the overall system that is known as tria nomina (that is, the gentilicium system) but without being considered typical examples of the name format.

Problem number 4: there are all sorts of situations when people had multiple cognomina. Adoption was one. A nickname or alias (sometimes called a supernomen) was another. From around the first century CE, some people started to give multiple cognomina more freely as these became used as everyday names, or when multiple branches of a family needed to be recognised in a child’s name.

So, there are a huge number of situations where the name format we call tria nomina has somewhere between two and five+ names for men, and anywhere from one name upwards for women. In fairness, most reference works from the OCD to Wikipedia are not advocating for the use of tria nomina as a technical term – Solin’s OCD article states clearly that ‘The official designation of a freeborn male Roman citizen embraced five components.’ Nevertheless, I think it’s still quite a commonly used shorthand in scholarship, and I don’t know that it’s a useful one. What I strongly prefer is using a term like “Roman citizen-status name” which indicates nothing about the number of names used but only the status the name indicates, as appropriate to that individual’s time and place.

Because my work skews quite early, and takes in other cultures of Italy which also used inherited family names, I often tend to talk about “names with a gentilicium” and “names without a gentilicium” as indicators of possible free/freed status and enslaved or foreign status, respectively. But I can see that that might not be universally applicable. If you work on a different time and place to me, I’d be interested to know how you talk about Roman names in your work, and how you describe them.