Marriages, families, households

Family and identity The Roman name advertised more than personal identity: it advertised family, an essential ingredient – perhaps the essential ingredient – in identity. For freeborn male citizens, father and grandfather were included in the most detailed form of nomenclature, so Julius Caesar was Gaius Iulius Caesar, son of Gaius, grandson of Gaius, expressed in succinct abbreviation as C. Iulius C. f. C. n. Caesar. The very succinctness added to the impact: this was a label immediately recognizable. The label proclaimed to the world that this man was of citizen family for at least three generations. He had roots in the Roman polity and culture. And, for the few hundred senatorial families, if the name was familiar, if it struck echoes of previous generations of high achievers, it was a powerful weapon in commanding respect and all kinds of influence, especially access to high office in the republican period when electoral competition was fierce. In the late Republic, the production of genealogies was an active industry, and sometimes divine ancestors were claimed. Julius Caesar's family connection with Venus was taken up by his heir Octavian/Augustus and built into the very fabric of his power and image. Female citizens had a simpler form of nomenclature, but ‘filiation’ was an essential element, so Caesar's daughter was Iulia C. f., and she remained a member of her father's family even after marriage, so as Pompey's wife she remained a Julian. In those cases (rare by the late Republic) where a woman formally entered her husband's family (contracting a manus marriage), it could be indicated in her name that she belonged to her husband, as for Caecilia Metella Crassi, whose large circular tomb still stands along the Appian Way: she was ‘of Crassus’, probably a son of the triumvir Crassus at the end of the Republic. That form of name was parallel with that of slaves. A slave of M(arcus) Crassus was M(arci) ser(uus), or simply Marci.