Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ancient Romans)

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This page documents an English Wikipedia naming convention. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should follow, though it should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

There are about 5,000 citizens of ancient Rome about which we have some biographical information, and for a combination of reasons, naming each one uniquely for articles is not straightforward. Even the twenty-odd most famous can be problematic; Caesar usually means Julius Caesar, but the cognomen was later used by all Roman emperors. (The problem is not unique to Wikipedia; the Oxford Classical Dictionary has an appendix of alternative names by which some Romans are known, and Pauly-Wissowa uses a numbering system.)

This convention is intended to amplify on the generic "use the most common name in English" rule, and to cover the cases of extreme ambiguity and obscure personages.

The "most common" rule always trumps, so for instance we use Livy instead of Titus Livius, and Germanicus instead of Germanicus Julius Caesar. In addition, the usual names of emperors always "own" those articles, even for the less-well-known ones, so we have Titus, Claudius, and Nero as articles on individuals, even though these are generic names shared by many other Romans.

The essence of the convention is to use the shortest unambiguous name as the title of the article, and to add a dated biographical detail, such as the date of a consulship, if the full name is shared by several. If a reliable birth year is not available (which is usually the case), the biographical detail should be the first time in the highest office recorded for the individual.

For instance, Curius Dentatus is sufficient, because the only one known is Manius Curius Dentatus, but we need Gaius Fulvius Flaccus to distinguish the consul of 134 BC from several other Fulvii Flacci. It is possible to have a compound article for all the bearers of a single name which is shared by a number of notable Romans, like Lucius Valerius Flaccus (disambiguation), with Lucius Valerius Flaccus as the consul. In this case, we only have a paragraph of information on each of the lesser Valerii Flacci; this is about the limit. Compound pages should be avoided unless only one or two men of that name are likely to be mentioned or linked to; otherwise it gets too confusing. If it were divided, the consul would probably go to Lucius Valerius Flaccus (consul 195 BC), while one later non-consul would be at Lucius Valerius Flaccus (praetor 63 BC), and so on.

Redirects and/or disambiguation pages should be created for each full trinomial or longer name, as well for the trinomial name with praenomen abbreviated; please abbreviate Gaius as C., and Gnaeus as Cn., as the Romans did, although the wrong abbreviations may be useful as redirects from misspellings. (Trinomial plus filiation is possible too, but seems excessive.) In addition, there should be disambiguation pages for praenomina, nomina, and cognomina, since these are often used by themselves in running text, leaving it a mystery as to which of several might have been meant.