I've been watching the HBO mini-series Rome lately. It is an excellent drama that depicts the city in a way that is vastly more grim than it was in popcorn movies like Gladiator, but is more consistent with the ancient Rome that we see from the remnants of its arts and writings.

The series drove me to look more deeply into the lives of the people who are so convincingly represented on screen. I began encountering statements like "She married Marcus Junius Brutus, a relative nobody in the political scene. From this marriage, Servilia had one son: Marcus Junius Brutus." or "Atia Balba Caesonia married the Macedonian governor and senator Gaius Octavius. Their children were Octavia Thurina Minor and a younger Gaius Octavius, later Caesar Augustus."

I was maddeningly confused by the naming conventions, so I looked them up as well. Here, you like it or not, you'll be treated to an introduction of the Roman naming conventions.

In the naming convention used in ancient Rome, derived from that of the Etruscan civilization, the names of male patricians normally consist of three parts (tria nomina): the praenomen (given name), nomen gentile (name of the gens or clan) and cognomen (belonging to a family within the gens). Sometimes a second cognomen (called agnomen) was added. A male who was adopted also showed his "filiation".

The praenomen roughly equates to the given, or Christian, name of today. Compared to most cultures, Romans used a tiny number of different pranomina: most people were given names from a list of fewer than forty, reduced to about 18 in the late Republic. This form of "first" name, except for familiar or friendly use, was relatively unimportant, and was not frequently used on its own. The more common names include: Flavius, Gaius, Gnaeus, Lucius, Marcus, Titus.

The second name or nomen gentile is the name of the gens (the family clan), in masculine form for men. The original gentes were descended from the family groups that settled Rome. These eventually developed into entire clans, which covered specific geographic regions. The more common second names include: Aemilius, Claudius, Cornelius, Domitius, Julius, Antonius and Valerius.

The third name, or cognomen, began as a nickname or personal name that distinguished individuals within the same gens. During the Roman Republic and Empire, the cognomen is inherited from father to son, serving to distinguish a family within a Gens. Often the cognomen was chosen based on some physical or personality trait, sometimes with ironic results: Julius Caesar's cognomen meant hairy although he was balding, and Tacitus's cognomen meant silent, while he was a well-known orator.

A distinction could even be made in families with an agnomen. A few of these were inherited like the cognomen, thus establishing a sub-family within a family. The majority, however, were used as nicknames. A few examples include Africanus, Augustus (for Emperors), Britannicus, Caligula, Germanicus, and Imperator.

(I won't complicate things by introducing the conventions for females at this point)
So, let's at look the name of one of the few military geniuses in the Western history, who extended the Roman world to as far as Britannia and who catalyzed the breakdown of the Roman Republic. The first season of Rome focuses on this man.

Gaius Julius Caesar (100 BC – 44 BC)

• Praenomen (sort of like a nickname): Gaius
• Nomen gentile (name of the gen): Julius, an important patrician family of ancient Rome supposed to have descended from Julus, son of Aeneas (one of the princes who were defeated in the war of Troy and fled to Italy). The name is also seen as Iulius.
• Cognomen (name of family branch): Caesar. It originally meant "hairy", which suggests that the Iulii Caesares, a specific branch of the gens Iulia bearing this name, were conspicuous for having fine heads of hair. The change of Caesar from being a familial name to an imperial title occured around AD 68, several generations after Julius Caesar. At that time the word was pronounced as "KAI-sahr" in Classical Latin. It spawned imperial titles in other languages such as Kaiser in German, Czar in Russian, and Qaysar in Arabic.

God bless Wikipedia! The majority of this post is compiled with information from the greatest source of knowledge on the Internet.