Aemilia gens
In the late Republic, several other gentes claimed descent from Numa, including the Pompilii, Pomponii, Calpurnii, and Pinarii.
However, as Livy observed, this was not possible, as Pythagoras was not born until more than a century after Numa's death, and was still living in the early days of the Republic.
Still another version relates that the gens was descended from Amulius, the wicked uncle of Romulus and Remus, who deposed his brother Numitor to become king of Alba Longa.
[1] In the late Republic, a number of minor families claimed descent from the figures of Rome's legendary past, including through otherwise unknown sons of Numa.
Modern historians dismiss these as late inventions, but the claim of the Aemilii was much older, and there was no corresponding need to demonstrate the antiquity of a gens that was already prominent at the beginning of the Republic.
The praenomen Mamercus is derived from Mamers, a god worshipped by the Sabelli of central and southern Italy, and usually regarded as the Sabellic form of Mars.
The daughters of the Aemilii are known to have used the numerical praenomina Prima, Secunda, and Tertia, although these were frequently treated as cognomina, and placed at the end of the name.
The oldest stirps of the Aemilii bore the surname Mamercus, together with its diminutive, Mamercinus; these appear somewhat interchangeably in early generations.
[8] The name Aemilius Papus occurs again in the time of the emperor Hadrian, but properly speaking these appear to have belonged to the Messia gens, and probably claimed descent from the more illustrious Aemilii through a female line.
[9] Barbula, or "little beard", occurs as the surname of one branch of the Aemilii, which appears in history for about a century beginning in the time of the Samnite Wars, and accounting for several consulships.
In the final decades of the Republic, they revived a number of names originally belonging to older stirpes of the Aemilian gens, including Mamercus as a praenomen, Regillus as a cognomen, and Paullus as both.
