I've been taking Latin for four years and this still isn't very clear to me.
Apparently Roman women were given the names of their fathers' families. This obviously pretty common even today- usually women have their father's last name, not their mother's.
But my Latin teacher said that all the women in a Roman family would have the same first name. Like two sisters who were the daughter of Claudius would both be named Claudia. How did this work? Did they not go by their first names ever and use nicknames? Were they called Claudia Minor and Claudia Major? Also how did this work for slave-girls, who didn't necessarily know their fathers?
And didn't Romans already have their family name as a 'last name' too? The main character in my Latin textbook is named Quintus Caecilius Iucundus and his father was named Lucius Caecilius Iucundus. Presumably 'Caecilius Iucundus' functions as a family name or a 'last name'. IIRC Iucundus was like their 'tribe' name and Caecilius applied to their family specifically. So would a daughter just be named Caecilia Iucunda, without a third name?
And what happened when they got married? Did they change their first name, the way women today change their last name? My Latin textbook is making this more confusing. Two of the characters are married and have the name- Domitia and Domitian. But with other couples in the story- Caecilius & Metella and Salvius & Rufilla they have different names.
It just seems odd that they wouldn't have names, even with gender roles at the time, individual names seem like something instinctual for humans.
Thanks!
It's not a question of women having the same family names or the same personal names. All women only legally had one name, at least in the Republic and the early part of the Principate. Their only legal name was the feminine form of their nomen. That's it, it's really that simple. Nicknames could be, and were, used to distinguish individuals if need be, but legally the nomem was the only name a woman had--not so different really from men, for whom the praenomen was virtually superfluous outside of familiar conversation and whose praenomem was largely legally irrelevant except in thr case of individuals sharing the same nomen and cognomen. See the threads linked to here (also, try searching around, this question is relatively common).
For what it's worth, Domitia and Domitian don't share the same name. Women did not customarily change their names upon marriage, although in speech they might be referred to by the genitive of their husband (e.g. Clodia Metelli, whose husband was Metellus). Domitia is the feminine form of the nomen of the gens Domitia. Domitian is the Anglicization of Domitianus, which is an adjectival cognomen of the sort usually used to describe adoption (e.g. Octavianus, Aemilianus, etc.). Domitian's full name at birth was Titus Flavius Domitianus and his elder brother Titus' birth name was Titus Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus. Notice the discrepancy--by Republican naming conventions they should have the same nomina and cognomina at birth, before the shenanigans of imperial titles. Already by Vespasian's reign the Republican naming conventions were breaking down--the names of the imperial household from Vespasian on are kind of bizarre and I'm not too familiar with the method (if any) in their formation. Domitian did not get his name through adoption from the gens Domitia into another family, as would've been customary during the Republic, but inherited the adjectival form of his mother's name, Domitia. So he and his wife didn't have the same name at all
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