The historical individual know as Marcus Antonius is remembered in English as Mark Atomy.
Why is his name anglicised when most other historical Roman names aren’t?
I’m guessing Shakespeare has something to do with it.
Good question - can we blame Shakespeare, or is he a WIlly-come-lately to this issue?
Why do we have both Julius and Julian (the adjective) as proper names? Why is there no more anglicized form of this name than “Brutus”?
This article suggests that in the vocative case (which you’d use to address Marcus), “Marcus Antonius” sounds a lot like “Mark Antony”
The other names are pronounced differently from the Latin, though.
Some names, like Octavian, are also anglicized. (Gaius Octavius was posthumously adopted as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, meaning Julius Caesar from the family of Octavius. His enemies refused to use his new name.) Octavian is often referred to as Augustus.
Missed the edit window. I grabbed the names of a couple of emperors:
Julian: Flavius Claudius Julianus
Juvenal: Decimus Junius Juvenalis
If a name ends in “an” it’s probably anglicized. And in fact, in Latin there was no letter J or U, so even Julius Caesar is slightly anglicized. (It would have been G. IVLIVS CAESAR.)
The last king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, is usually called Tarquin in English.
Other Anglicized names, some of which OP may have heard of:
- Octavian - Gaius Octavius Thurinus (later Caesar Augustus)
- Vespasian - Vespasianus
- Domitian - Domitianus
- Trajan - Traianus
- Hadrian - Hadrianus
- Diocletian - Diocletianus
- Maximian - Maximianus
- Constatine - Constantinus
- Justinian - Iustinianus
The pronunciation of Caesar is also anglicized. The German word Kaiser (emperor) comes from Caesar and is closer to the original pronunciation.
My Latin is a bit rusty, and Roman names can be quite complicated, but I don’t think that “Octavius” would be a family name in any sense. It just means “Eighth child”. “Caesar” and “Julius” were both family names (Julius being a subset of Caesar). “Gaius” is completely a given name.
Did he have anything to do with health food, skin care or cosmetics?
Atomy
Octavius’s name was Gaius Octavius Thurinus and the Thurinus was given to him after birth (but before Caesar adopted him).
In that case, Octavius is his nomen, not praenomen. I think it’s a bit like giving someone the last name of John instead of Doe or Smith. He was part of the gens Octavia, so not a first name.
No, it doesn’t mean eighth child. Why would they have only Quintus through Decimus, and none for the first four children? How many families had nine or ten children that survived infancy? One well-argued theory I heard is that in old times, these names reflected the month in which the child was born. So a boy born in March would be called Marcus, and so on. Born spring, named after a god, born in fall, named after a number. By the Classical era, the month connection was in the past.
You mean Primus, Secundus, Tertius, and Quatrius? They do show up here and there.
Roman names were a bit weird to begin with, but this part is not unusual for them. Ceasar was similarly Gaius Julius, which was also not an uncommon name - and Julius started out as, and is still today, a first name for many people. Actually, it probably was a reasonably common first name outside of the narrow cultural elite.
According to Roman custom one’s friends and relatives would normally have used the Praenomen, but others would use more formal address. It would be quite normal for two different people, depending on their relationship, to address the same individual differently. Part of the reason for this was that Romans evidently had the bizarre habit of re-using only a handful of Praenomen, so that simply distinguishing two males in the same household might get rather confusing without using the Nomen. Although most Classical cultures didn’t use anything like the complex naming schemes of the Romans, the re-use of names was rather common, much to the irritation of historians.
I would personally not try to anglicise people’s names, Roman or not, so I would write Marcus Antonius, Cicero, etc., but I believe you are mistaken and plenty of anglicization is going on, whence Terence, Horace, Tully, Martial, etc.
Where? I haven’t seen them.
A famous one :Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus aka Pline the young
and I think there is a Tertius somewhere in the Bible.
And we Anglicize all the classic Italian/Roman city names (Roma, Firenze, Torino, etc.).
Of course, Pope Adrian IV’s name was not anglicised: He was English!
He was Latinised as Adrianus. Previous Adrians were anglicised versions of something else (for instance, Adrianus III was a Roman, born Agapitus
And of course, he wasn’t born Adrian. His name was Nicholas Breakspear.
I am utterly without any education in Latin, but I seem to recall from my choirboy days that a “C” followed by a vowel is pronounced “Ch” which would render Caeser as something similar to Sheisser in German.
Not that that I am judging the man, of course. He seemed OK in the Asterix and Obelix comics.