Naming conventions for women in ancient Rome

Naming conventions for women in ancient Rome differed from nomenclature for men, and practice changed dramatically from the Early Republic to the High Empire and then into Late Antiquity.

Numerical adjectives might distinguish among sisters, such as Tertia, "the Third" (compare Generational titles in English names).

[2] This tradition casts doubt on the usage of numerical names: the masculine praenomina Quintus ("the Fifth"), Sextus ("the Sixth"), and Decimus ("the Tenth") were widely used without reference to birth order, because they were passed on.

[3] By the Late Republic, a cognomen, the third of the tria nomina, becomes more important in distinguishing family branches of the main gens.

Likewise, in the family of Octavia the Younger and Mark Antony, the naming conventions for their daughters (Antonia Major and Antonia Minor) and Octavia's by her first husband (Claudia Marcella Major and Claudia Marcella Minor) are conventional, but that for their granddaughter Livilla, daughter of Nero Claudius Drusus, is not.

In the Theodosian dynasty, the daughter of Theodosius I was not Theodosia but Galla Placidia, and named partly for her mother.

Late Byzantine empresses bore Greek names since the principal language of the Byzantine Empire was not Latin but Greek: Many times women needed unofficial names to differenciate them between their relatives, this was often done with the help of suffixes, for example the diminutive suffix illa/ila (alternatively ulla/ula or olla/ola) meaning "small" or "little" was used often, for example: Julilla for a young Julia, Drusilla for a young Drusa.

The suffix derived from the word ulla which was the word for a little pit and could be used to denote that the woman in question was a younger relative of someone with the same name, that she was still a little girl, or simply implying affection, for example Cicero's daughter Tullia was called by him "Tulliola" even as an adult despite not having any older sisters or other notable female relatives.

There were also rare cases of combining two suffixes, such as "Agripp-in(a)-illa"[a] the wife of Marcus Gavius Squilla Gallicanus, the consul of 127.

[13] The suffixes were not always added to the end of the nomen or cognomen, but sometimes also to a woman's numeral, for example, Brutus' sister Junia Tertia was nicknamed Tertulla.