A Note on the use of the Praenomen

Abstract

It is recognized that Romans of the late Republic did not normally address or refer to one another by praenomen alone (for the conventions, see J. N. Adams, ‘Conventions of naming in Cicero’, CQ n.s. 28 [1978], 145 ff.; J. P. V. D. Balsdon, Romans and Aliens, ch. 11; Fordyce on Catullus 68 init.). Most instances in which the praenomen is used alone are easily explicable (see Adams, p. 161); either the persons concerned are members of the same family, with names otherwise identical (‘Marce fili’, ‘Quinte frater’; ‘Luci’ in de Fin. 5. 71, cf. 15, etc.), or the praenomen itself is particularly distinctive and aristocratic (Appius Claudius or Servius Sulpicius).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 33 citations exist upstream.