Talk:Julia gens

Extinction of the Julii Caesares?

Is it at all certain that the Julii Caesares ceased to exist with the death of the dictator, or his issue? This isn't about the Julio-Claudian line, which by all accounts was extinguished. But it's clear from the list above that Caesar had several contemporaneous relatives, including uncles and cousins, who achieved sufficient prominence to be known to history. Surely some of them must have had sons and grandsons. Even if no member of the family came to prominence in imperial times, it's clear from other gentes that a family could exist for generations without attracting notice. It may well have been considered risky for a member of such a family to enter public life. I'm not saying that there were later Julii Caesares; merely that there doesn't seem to be any positive evidence of their extinction, and there were several men of the family living at the same time. I favor restoring the earlier text of this paragraph, which doesn't say anything about the extinction of the family. P Aculeius (talk) 00:54, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, we know that there were three branches of the family in the 1st century BC. The Julius Caesar had only one son, Caesarion, killed by Octavian. His cousin Sextus Julius Sex. f. Sex. n. Caesar was killed in Syria by his soldiers; described as "a young man" (Appian, BC, iii. 77), he may have been still childless. His other cousin Lucius Julius L. f. L. n. Caesar was supporter of Pompey killed after Thapsus. He was only a proquaestor when he died, so not very advanced in the cursus honorum and perhaps still young and childless.

Interestingly, the Julii Caesares were experiencing the same difficulties as many other patrician gentes in the 1st century BC, and would have disappeared as well if Caesar hadn't adopted Octavian.T8612 (talk) 21:12, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

Iulia vs Julia

There is no J in classical Latin. Should this article be moved to Iulia (gens) ? ♆ CUSH ♆ 07:02, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

No, this is the English Wikipedia, and the names starting with I have been translated. Same with Junia, Juventia, etc. Academic sources say Julia, so we follow them. T8612 (talk) 10:13, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Translated? The gens in parentheses is not translated. Should articles and their titles not be consistent and accurate? The suggestion that the name was Julia is factually wrong. Names should be presented in the context of their usage in history, not in later Anglicization. ♆ CUSH ♆ 11:56, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

No, we follow academic sources, which universally use the "Julia" form. The article could mention that in Latin the name was spelt IVLIA (notice that you also have to replace the "u" with a "v") though. All the articles on WP use modern Latin names, not classical Latin. The amount of changes required to move all the articles from modern to classical Latin would be gigantic and therefore it's not going to happen (you would have to change them to Avgvstvs, Marcvs Avrelivs, Gaivs Ivlivs Caesar, etc.). T8612 (talk) 12:44, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

"Julius" nomen in the Julio-Claudian dynasty

@P Aculeius: Isn't your inclusion of the nomen "Julius" for the members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty technically incorrect? Augustus dropped "Julius" and put "Caesar" in the position of gentile name, a practice which would be presumably followed by his heirs, i.e. the whole dynasty itself. The fasti and some sources I have access to all refer to the emperors Tiberius and Caligula, for example, as "Tiberius Caesar Augustus" and "Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus" respectively, never with the Julius. Augustus's grandsons are called Lucius Caesar and Gaius Caesar, not Lucius or Gaius Julius Caesar. Their filiations in the fasti are always given after Caesar rather than before (as in C. Caesar Augusti f.), so that presumably is the nomen. I also believe that Agrippa was the praenomen of Agrippa Postumus after his adoption. Avis11 (talk) 01:26, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

What someone used day-to-day or is commonly called in any number of sources has little to do with technical or official nomenclature—in the sense that we use that word today, as I'm not sure such a distinction existed in Rome; plenty of Romans before and after Augustus used whatever form of their names they happened to prefer, no matter what custom, precedent, or other people called them. I'm reasonably sure you'll find the nomen in numerous secondary sources—I know I have—and the forms used in these articles are generally the technical ones, with such accommodations as necessary (for example, in the article on the Junii, Brutus is still "Marcus Junius Brutus" rather than "Quintus Servilius Caepio Brutus", although in the article on the Servilii, he's called by his adoptive name, which is then explained). Michael Grant gives the nomen in The Roman Emperors, and Chronicle of the Roman Emperors by Chris Scarre shows Tiberius Julius Caesar from Tiberius' adoption in AD 4, and Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus for Caligula. PW infers the name for Gaius and Lucius, the heirs of Augustus, and explicitly uses it for their brother Agrippa.

With regard to Agrippa Postumus, you'll find his name given in numerous variations and in no fixed order; sometimes as the tria nomina "Marcus Julius Caesar", or "Agrippa Julius Caesar", or "Postumus Julius Caesar", or any of the foregoing without a nomen, or simply as "Postumus" or "Agrippa Postumus". None of which is incorrect as a way to refer to him—just that whatever you call him, technically he was "Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa" before his adoption, with or without "Postumus" attached, and afterward he was "Marcus Julius Caesar", usually with "Agrippa" and/or "Postumus" appended—but from day to day only some of these names were needed or used. P Aculeius (talk) 03:55, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

@P Aculeius: After some research I figure only some used Julius, others discarded it. The Pauly Wissowa gives Julius for Germanicus, two of his sons, and for Agrippa Postumus, while only inferring it for Gaius Caesar, Lucius Caesar, and Caligula. It does say that there is no evidence for it on the latter examples. There's this article by Syme (p. 185) which enumerates which of them were called "Julius". He explicitly says that Tiberius, Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar were not, but that Tiberius's son Drusus, Germanicus, Germanicus's two sons, and Agrippa Postumus were so. A quick research on inscriptions largely corroborates it. Do you mind if I make the corresponding changes? Avis11 (talk) 20:10, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

On a sidenote, Syme (pp. 185, 186) also said Postumus was never called Vipsanius, which had been long since discarded by his father, and suggested a less variable and convoluted evolution of Postumus' nomenclature, whatever scattered individual inscriptions might show. Avis11 (talk) 20:41, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Syme is addressing what people chose to be called, not what their proper names really were. He even provides clear indications that all of these individuals were still reckoned part of the Julia gens—their daughters were still called "Julia", and their freedmen "Julius". In other words, by all law and tradition it was still part of their names, whatever they chose to be called or expected their followers to call them on coins and monumental inscriptions. The fact that Agrippa chose to hide his plebeian origins, or that Augustus presented himself as sui generis above and beyond all mortals, didn't change those basic facts. PW may say that it finds no evidence that they used their nomina or that they were celebrated with them on coins or in inscriptions—but it still infers that it properly belonged to them—as do other perfectly reliable scholars and secondary sources.

This article includes the technically correct nomenclature of members of the Julia gens, whether by birth or adoption, insofar as readers might find them under their nomina at any point in time or in any source. So it would not be appropriate to remove their nomina simply because a few of the individuals either chose to ignore their nomina or substitute their cognomina for them—it would run directly counter to the principles upon which these articles are written, and enforce a form of orthodoxy that the sources do not support, by excluding technically correct nomenclature even though it appears in widely-read sources. P Aculeius (talk) 23:25, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Syme says exactly the opposite: that Julius was officially dropped as a proper name and replaced with Caesar. There is zero difference between the 'technicaly correct' nomenclature and the other one usually displayed. The sources I know overwhelmingly give the names of, say, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, without the 'Julius'. Syme, Mason Hammond, and others are in agreement that 'Caesar' was a nomen in itself, to the detriment of 'Julius', and that inscriptions which follow this pattern are accurate and reliable representations of the corresponding person's official name. Official records are of key importance in uncovering a person's name, so your dismissiveness of them and over-reliance on naming traditions (which are changeable anyway) is confusing. Of the sources you gave, apparently the only one which even elaborates on the issue is PW. It 'infers' Julius, but also organizes its biographical entries in alphabetical order of gentile nomina, and so it would be inconvenient anyway to place Gaius Caesar far away from, say, Julius Caesar. It also predates Syme, so the author and his contemporaries perhaps weren't aware of the correct nomenclature and got it wrong, inferring something that doesn't actually exist.

I see little foundation for your idea that someone's family name is somehow connected intrinsically, almost in a metaphysical manner, to said person in such way that it 'remains' even after a supposedly-superficial name change. No source does this; when they say that M. Vipsanius Agrippa changed his name to M. Agrippa, and that Augustus' grandsons were called G. and L. Caesar, what is meant is exactly that. Yes, they were still part of a recognizable gens, but their name needn't reflect that (women's names did so, as you noted, but that doesn't matter here). A member of the imperial family, of all people, could – and, historically, did – change his name at will. I'm not sure about the omission of "Julius" being contrary to the principles of the article: the fact that there's a Julio-Claudian dynasty section separate from Julii Caesares in the main page already itself already implies that something, perhaps the nomenclature, will be different. Avis11 (talk) 01:47, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

There's nothing "metaphysical" about the situation. You're treating Roman names as though the act of pronouncing them or inscribing them on something altered reality. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa never "changed" his name, because the act of "changing one's name" at will never existed as a legal concept in Roman society. There were only two ways in which any Roman acquired a new name: adoption into another family, or by calling himself (or getting someone else to call him) something else. There was no registry office one could go into and ask for a form to apply for a change of name, no central database requiring all changes of names to be stamped by a judge and filed for reference, no bureaucracy telling someone that he had to say or write it a certain way, because that was officially right and everything else officially wrong. That way of treating names didn't exist until the 20th century. But by the same token, there was no "official" act that someone could do to rid themselves of a troublesome name—all that he could do was stop using it and hope that everybody else did too. Obviously that was likely to happen if you were the emperor or well-connected with the imperial family.

You're relying on a hypothesis—or perhaps merely a metaphor—put into a lecture by Ronald Syme in 1958, apparently never expounded upon before or since by any other source, that in a handful of instances occurring only within two generations or so of the family of Augustus, their cognomina didn't merely supplant their nomina in everyday use, but actually became nomina for those persons and those persons alone: that "Caesar" and "Agrippa" were gentilicia, not merely cognomina used in the place of nomina for some kind of dramatic effect, or to obscure the origins of ordinary mortals. But I don't see how this metaphor could ever be substantiated, since by definition the gentilicium was inherited from one's father and passed down to one's children, indicating membership in a gens (hence the name 'gentilicium'), and affinity to one's gentiles. But the gens to which Augustus and his adopted children and grandchildren belonged was the gens Julia, not the gens Caesaria (which never existed); the non-ruling, non-heir-to-the-throne members of the family (all women, since all of the men concerned here were heirs) were named Julia, not Caesaria, which never occurs; and while "Agrippina" does, Agrippina the Elder was Vipsania Agrippina, while Agrippina the Younger was Julia Agrippina.

These names were never really nomina, because they were never the names of gentes, and were never truly inherited; at best they were used in place of nomina by Agrippa and Augustus personally, and practically never again after the death of Augustus; their odd usage never affected any member of their families beyond the emperor, his best friend, and his designated heirs, and perfectly acceptable sources take for granted that they still had proper nomina despite the fact that they didn't use them. Your argument is that if they didn't use them, then those weren't their names—or to put it in modern terms, that if John Smith gets everyone to call him "Superman", he stops being John Smith.

These individuals are on this page because at some point in their lives they were members of the Julia gens. Accordingly, the form of their names under which they are indexed is the form including the nomen "Julius". The fact that some of them (mainly Augustus) preferred not to use it once he was ruling an empire by himself doesn't affect what his proper name was, and the fact that he prescribed the form in which his adopted sons' or grandsons' names should be written doesn't mean that the technically correct forms are wrong. It's not about how many sources do use them and how many don't; it's about what form belongs in a list of Julii, because without the nomen they stick out like sore thumbs, and don't appear to belong at all. These forms of the name do exist in modern scholarship, including sources published since Ronald Syme's 1958 lecture; they do not get excised because some other form might be preferable in some other context. In this article we use the form that justifies their inclusion here. P Aculeius (talk) 05:35, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Julius Valerius

Who is exactly the fourth-century historian "Julius Valerius", whose entry here only contains an incomplete citation to Angelo Mai? Is he perhaps Julius Valerius Alexander Polemius? Avilich (talk) 15:58, 5 March 2021 (UTC) The 1911 Britannica and 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia seem to support this. Avilich (talk) 16:00, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

So it is. I've updated the entry; might need an additional citation for his identification with the consul, assuming that his name is certain (I note that our table calls the consul "Flavius Polemius"), but in any case it now links to the article that has some relevant citations. P Aculeius (talk) 16:31, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

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