>>938962006
roman names had 2-3 names. the nomen, what we would call the surname, identified which family you belonged to. this was the most important name you had unless you had a cognomen.
the praenomen, what we might call the given name, wasn't very important and was mostly there so you could tell people from the same family apart. there were only about 20 you could choose from because that's the tradition and romans fucking loved their traditions.
the cognomen was almost like a title or epithet but was still part of your name. you earned them either for some great feat or some particularly unique feature about you.
they didn't only name their first 3 children, they just reused the same praenomen a lot. women also tended to not even be given praenomina.
and for adoption, its because you needed a male heir to take care of you when you got old but it was very easy for all your kids to die so you needed to find some guy with no parents and make him your son. or you knew your kids were worthless shitheads so you found a nice boy and replaced your useless spawn with this new guy. he would get the inheritance as payment for taking care of 2 strange old people.
